


The Princess Who Never Smiled

by aurora_borealis



Series: bird girls [1]
Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-25 09:33:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22393888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_borealis/pseuds/aurora_borealis
Summary: “"Come," he said, "come and try to enliven the Princess Without a Smile: any one who succeeds shall gain her as his wife." And as soon as he had said this all folk thronged up at the gates of the palace, driving up from all sides, coming on foot, Tsarévichi and princes' sons, boyárs and noblemen, military folk and civil. Feasts were celebrated, rivers of mead flowed, and the Princess would not smile.”-Alexander Afanasyev, “The Princess Who Never Smiled”AU- Theodora "Theo" Decker, recovering in Antwerp, looks back at her past and reflects on her current life, and her relationship with her old friend, Slava.
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Series: bird girls [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1617583
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21





	The Princess Who Never Smiled

**Author's Note:**

> content warnings for addiction, sexual assault, and domestic violence.

_“"Come," he said, "come and try to enliven the Princess Without a Smile: any one who succeeds shall gain her as his wife." And as soon as he had said this all folk thronged up at the gates of the palace, driving up from all sides, coming on foot, Tsarévichi and princes' sons, boyárs and noblemen, military folk and civil. Feasts were celebrated, rivers of mead flowed, and the Princess would not smile.”-_ Alexander Afanasyev, “The Princess Who Never Smiled”

___

When I was younger I never hated my first name, but I was shy about it- “Theodora” felt too long and grandiose for me to claim, even if my nickname wasn’t really a girl’s name. I liked it, it just didn’t quite feel like me. People called me either, and still do. Mostly I was preoccupied by sharing my last name with my dad. But all in all, I never spoke much about any of that. I was always quiet about those things. Until I was sent to Las Vegas.

Slava’s full name was Bohuslava Volodymyrivna Pavlikovskaya, a name that frequently came up in conversation after we became friends. Her old friend Judy had shortened her name affectionately and she’d used that form from then on in English-speaking places. “Curse my bastard father for this name,” she had said so many times in our youth, “naming me for the town Bohuslav in Ukraine... I could have had a normal name like Irina or Katya or even something like Snezhana. But no. You, however. Beautiful name for beautiful girl.” I wasn’t so sure of that part, even though she was always so insistent about it. She had a nickname for me as well, one I never particularly asked for but accepted anyway, all those years ago when we were only kids even if we didn’t quite realize it. When you’re young you sometimes don’t think you are, even if I don’t suppose we had many reasons to feel similar to others our age.

I didn’t know whether or not to be offended by being called “Princess” when she first called me it, so I had just said, “what?” blankly and thought for yet another time that day that it was too hot for me to be wearing a wool skirt that reached below my knees, but I always tried to cover every inch of skin I could and to this day it comes naturally to do so, regardless of the heat, and I thought of how I actually thought her name sounded kind of cool like a warrior queen from some medieval poem, and wondered what the town was like and did she hate it if she’d been, and I wished I could go to any of the places my mom had told me about being in when she was young, anywhere but my dad’s house in Las Vegas.

“Tsarevna Nesmeyana,” she had said, nodding her head knowingly, her long black hair uncombed and smelling like beer, her black t-shirt more like a minidress over her slight frame, covering the tops of her long legs like a hard rock groupie, though she looked more like Isabelle Adjani in _Nosferatu the Vampyre_ , intense and avant-garde and stunning. I guess some people at our school agreed with the “intense” part because I once was cutting science class to go to the school library and read _Madame Bovary_ – yeah, I know, ‘she wanted to die but she also wanted to live in New York’- where I overheard these preppy Yearbook Club types joking her superlative would be “most likely to become Nevada’s Aileen Wuornos” and then they said something about me after that which I tried to forget. The guys- at least the ones who didn’t think she was gross - wanted Slava, the wildest, craziest, girl in school, and if you believed rumors, she’d been with basically all of them. Then there were other rumors and some of them involved me- the weird new girl who was a different kind of crazy. She wasn’t doing herself any favors, but neither was I.

“The Princess Who Never Smiled? Classic fairy story about a girl who looks just like you,” she’d continued and I rolled my eyes. I’d never heard of it. But I liked my name because my mother chose it. I liked how Slava said my real name, Theodora, when she was serious, how she made it sound like the Russian _Fyodora_ , and how Philip told me it sounded like the name of an artist but “Theo” also had a good sound for a girl and it wasn’t weird of me at all to like that too.

I tried thinking of all that every time I thought in later years that, on me, my name didn’t work, made me seem even more out of place and dated in my cardigans and wing-tip heels, like the name of one of the stiff and pale women in horrendous Edwardian hats in oil paintings on the walls of Kit’s friends. (Theodora Barbour sounded like the name of a ghost.) Friends who had wives who I guess meant well, some of them, but all looked the same and talked the same and came from the exact same lives and families and clearly thought my job was weird especially for a woman and who said things like “dear, your mother would be so proud and pleased, to know that she came from nothing and suffered so much but her daughter was doing so well,” and I thought my mother wouldn’t be proud of me at all as I stared at my feet that were wearing 1960s thrift shop shoes I’d owned since I was seventeen, and the part of me that had come to exist in Vegas wanted to say why don’t you all go fuck yourselves and stop being so condescending and presumptuous and how fucking dare you say that about my mother and her family. But the considerable part of me that was in fact my father’s daughter, the part that, unlike Rappaccini’s daughter, thought I had had just as much poison in my nature as he did, the part of me that had a movie actor’s genes that created a real life actor and by that I mean a liar, the part that had inherited his vices, the part that was a woman who in my estimate took after a bad man rather than a good woman, the part that made my profession into a scam and risked everything Hobie had in his life after everything he’d done for me, the part that laughed in Lucius Reeve’s face about how ridiculous it was that I could be tied to shootouts only to go on and shoot a cold-blooded man dead in hot blood like I was a femme fatale in one of my dad’s neo-noirs, the part of me that I felt was a bad artist’s rendition of my mother and would always fail to emulate her especially in imitation, the part of me that wanted to claim to be my mother’s daughter even though I was so certain I had no right to, well, that part of me thought _you wouldn’t have lasted a day in my mother’s shoes_ and turned up my chin and put on my coldest voice and laughed a little and said “my mother’s upbringing was something my grandparents gave her that few people are fortunate enough to have the opportunity to experience. I’m very proud indeed to be her daughter,” only then for me to back down from whatever I was trying as I threw back the rest of my Cuba Libre like it was a shot until some of it dripped onto my dove-gray vintage sweater, saying I needed to find my fiancé, a clearly false excuse, and walking away anxious and upset and directionless and not being able to sleep that night for a catalog of the wrong reasons that you can imagine, some reasons Kit may have guessed but I wasn’t with him to confirm, reasons my mother would be horrified to know were commonplace in my life. My father told me he thought I needed to learn to stand up for myself or I’d spend my life getting pushed around (“like you already let your mother do- if you were a boy I doubt you’d have this problem, but hey, here we are, it’s not too late”) and I supposed, later when I fired that gun, but first before that when I began my career of lies, I finally gave him what he wanted. I was sure I wasn’t what my mother would have wanted but I wore the name she gave me like it was a priceless necklace in one of her advertisements anyway.

_

The time in my college class I’d heard people so confidently discuss how addiction is really something that doesn’t affect women that much, which brought me back to entire days I could barely remember, or, unfortunately, could; and I remembered that at bridal preparation dates or parties when I’d show up shaking or with pupils the wrong size, and someone would whisper “she’s dealt with a lot of _problems,”_ said in the same tone as stuff from school like “I heard that new girl who hangs out with the scary Russian girl does _ecstasy and cocaine_ ,” and how sometimes they’d call me and Slava _junkie sluts_ , like the time at this summer party we were stoned and it was so hot we thoughtlessly lay down on the grass while the sprinklers went off and some guys were cheering after like _oh hell yeah_ and some jealous girlfriend said _oh come on Sex Slava and her little friend or whatever she is just want you to look at them all wet_ and some other guy said _well what were the junkie sluts doing lying down like that_ and some people laughed, and how a girl I met through Kit and was friends with for a little while told me to get out of her house because she thought my crushed pill was heroin and people on Park Avenue said I was just such a _nice_ girl but I was _on drugs_. The time a dinner party guest had said about some girl she knew from her daughter’s school, whose mother had left the father for a minor prince in Europe, “it’s really going to disadvantage her to grow up without a feminine influence,” and then looked at me- “oh, I’m sorry, I don’t mean anything against _you_ , Theodora, I know Hobie did everything for you, and I know Samantha has been your mother too,” and I kept thinking about when Philip told me his aunt had actually told him Hobie was “the sort of person who can’t raise a young boy like yourself”. Whenever I had to go to the doctor and they asked- Do you take any recreational drugs? Do you take any prescription drugs? Do you have a family history of addiction? Are you sexually active? And I’d struggle to get through the appointment, not to mention answer the questions. Platt, morosely drunk, looking at me, while I vaguely wondered if every one of these Park Avenue mannequin types (who always said they would have _never thought_ that _I_ would end up with _Kit_ and I wanted to ask what the fuck does that mean even though I knew it was some variation of my not being _sufficient_ in some quality or another that all these people had) we saw every day thought _we_ should have been the ones to marry one another, the fuckup and the girl who didn’t belong there, as he told me- “It’s nice you’ll be marrying my brother, because I haven’t seen Mommy this close to being happy for years. Kit and Todd thought you’d marry Andy when they were kids, but I never did…I always thought you were, you know, kind of different. Not in a bad way but…” looking at me for a long while, long and hard, like he was figuring out something. The amount of times over the years, recently multiplying even more than ever before- like when I carried Popchyk into the wedding planner’s office and she said _you’ll be replacing him with a real child soon enough!_ and in annoyance I thought _I would never “replace” my dog_ \- people said _when_ I had children, not if, and I’d long past given up correcting them, even when I sensed concern in their voices and eyes, certainly about whether I was _well enough_ for what was undoubtedly inevitable and natural to happen next even though Kit had never brought it up with me and I wondered why but was happy about it. The sinking feeling I remember haunting me every time I remembered after she died how when I was young my mother had once told me that it was all right to be my own person and I didn’t need to be like anyone else, and at the time I’d thought how kind she was, and now I realize she certainly meant it as a statement of love, but between then and now I’d wonder what I must have done.

_

I hadn’t minded when Slava (and sometimes Kotku, whose real name, I believe, was Kerry Hutchins) called me “Princess,” even though it sometimes annoyed me and made me uncomfortable if she did it when other people could hear. It was better than the other times people didn’t get my name: the well-meaning but rather discouraging “my lab partner is the New Girl, you know, the one from New York with the glasses, she never really talks, she has a long name? It would be rude to ask so late…” or the whispered, horrified, pitying, “you know, that girl who…she was in the Museum Attack, no wonder she’s so shy, how fucking awful, I’d never go outside again, I feel _so_ bad,” or the occasional shit like “Tweaker and Skank, whatever the fuck they’re called, with those weird names, they drank _all_ the vodka at the party last night”. (I overheard Hadley once- “Theo is her name,” she’d said, “she’s _nice_ and everything I guess, but she spends all her time hanging out with those druggie JD whores. They’ve been with all the guys, they’re the ones who get with _other girls_ …Even Kotku doesn’t do some of the things I heard Slava does.” A boy next to her: “so is Theo…you know…” Hadley said something else and after that I’d stopped going to her tame parties; that crowd had clearly made their mind up about me. It made me so uncomfortable but I never really talked to those other people after a certain point, so I could try and ignore it, and tell myself they were wrong, like when there were rumors in New York. In some cases, I frankly preferred being called a slut. In later years I came to see myself that way- by other people’s definition, I would be, and it was what it was, and there were worse things to accept in myself.)

But I suppose Slava turned out to be right about the nickname. Engaged to Kit Barbour, I had spent the past months nervous and even more distant than ever before from the man who was my fiancé, to the point where I’d just ran out on the engagement party to fly across the world and had not only almost died by my own hand but shot a man dead, rather than going through with becoming the wife of one of the most handsome and wealthy blue-bloods in New York.

“You seem so cold regarding him. Very frigid,” Slava had said to me in New York and then asked me, completely seriously, if I’d even been in bed with him yet and I’d gotten upset and told her I shouldn’t have expected her to understand because she had no idea what she was talking about even though she clearly did. And then for some reason I remembered how when we were fourteen and she was telling me about Alaska, and how her father had so often left her all alone in that town out in the middle of nowhere, and she’d asked me with wide, serious eyes, if I was still a virgin and I said yes, and she said maybe later she’d tell me something about that and come to think of it I don’t think she ever did, whatever it was; and I’d remembered what I’d worried my mother thought I’d been doing when I was caught skipping school with Tom and how I’d never spoken to him after the attack and how some of our classmates had already thought we were going out when we weren’t, and even though it made me a little uncomfortable I preferred people thinking I was maybe his girlfriend to some of the other rumors about me, and maybe there was something in me that other people recognized as _wrong_ even before everything, and maybe that was one of the reasons why I was so afraid of getting close to people, because if I did I would prove everyone but my mother right and I’d become someone she wouldn’t recognize or want. That long and torturous day of bridal preparations that made me feel like burned scraps of ancient painted wood or a flickering broken Sin City neon sign, I put on my largest sweater and coat to cover myself up, and Slava had also leaned in and for a second I was terrified she was about to kiss me again but she sniffed my neck which riled me just as much until she said, “ah, Parfum D’Hermes, I can afford very classy things like that now,” she raised her dark eyebrows, “no more running from mall cops, much better lifestyle to not have to steal, and to not have to depend on anyone when not stealing,” and If I had listened to my fifteen year old self that lived in me I might have yelled well what the fuck kind of _lifestyle_ do you have now, and you told me what you did after I left was that really so much better than what we did - but instead since I knew she would have been thinking about before she met me as well and would say _yes it was_ and because I had no one else to tell and she would be the perfect person to go to with this, I started to think about how I hated spending all day being manhandled even though I know that was how these things went and it would be better if I was left to do it myself but that wasn’t how it was, it was like I was a doll they were all dressing up, more like one of the sets in my mother’s ads than like one of the people like her who created them, and what was she trying to say when she told me I was the only girl she’d ever slept with right when she knew I was about to be married, and I was so drained but I wanted to belong there and I felt like I never would and I wanted Hobie to walk me down the aisle but I hadn’t talked about all this with him in depth because I couldn’t bring myself to be truthful to him, only I didn’t say any of this.

And, of course, there was Philip, and by that I mean, there wasn’t Philip, not in that way, even though I suppose by then both of us knew we never could be together, even if his British girlfriend Sarah (who I’d disgustedly thought of as _that simpering, clingy, hipster cow from England_ from the moment she introduced herself by embracing me without even asking) had never entered the picture. I still wanted him in my life some way or another even if it wouldn’t be a certain way; was that crazy, weird, wrong, even if I believed I was? Maybe we could have been closer friends all along? Just because Sarah, despite being annoying, was _normal_ and _stable_ and everything I wasn’t, didn’t have to mean I wasn’t good enough to be in the life of someone I shared so much with, right? I didn’t have anyone to tell things like this to, I couldn’t tell Philip, I knew I’d never be able to bring myself to say it to him even if he didn’t think I was pathetic and sick and defective, or attempting some delusional seduction (I always thought, in fact, if I ended up with him we’d just hold each other and kiss but I never thought about much more) but I knew he’d be the only one to understand what had happened the first time Kit and I tried to go to bed with each other and we couldn’t, it didn’t work, I made him turn off the lights and close the curtains so we couldn’t see our own hands two inches in front of our faces because I couldn’t stand the idea of him seeing what I looked like, and I lay down stiff like the Lady of Shalott in her boat, and I waited and he asked so nicely, are we fine, but his voice in the pitch dark as we held hands just brought me back in time and he held my hand for a while and pulled the covers over me and told me, so serene and kind and perfect in the dark like an ice sculpture of an angel and his hand was soft and protective like a doctor, I can get you some herbal tea if you want, I’m going to turn the light on in a moment if you think it would help, so I attempted to tell him that would be good, and he slowly moved to turn on the light while I hid under the covers and cried and wished it had been me and not my mother all those years ago and after a while I told him I needed to leave and go back home.

I was one fucking unhappy princess, if I could be counted as such.

_

I had been drifting in and out of sleep under a thick velvety duvet, sitting up against the headboard listlessly, wrapped in some old bathrobe Slava owned that was too large, unsure of the time. Her place in Antwerp wasn’t bad, and was clean, the opposite of her father’s vacant, mildewed house in Vegas, but in parts it was rather disorganized. Not cluttered, so much as, I could tell she rarely kept her bed made despite the cleanliness of the sheets and there was a calendar from a year before on a wall that still was on the page for September. Shoes were all over the floor and under the bed. The bed was black, glossy wood that appeared to be new from some expensive department store. In one of the rooms I was surprised to see a small and faded photograph of what appeared to be her as a young girl of maybe twelve, maybe in Alaska, undereye circles like eyeshadow, holding a rifle, her father behind her, looking serious (I’d been remembering lately, when we were young, her telling me her father taught her to shoot a gun, he said it was important for her to know, and if she kept her distance and aimed right, she could defend herself very well, and women shot better anyway. I wonder if that was some kind of compensation; if he knew she’d tried to lock him out in the cold. And I realized the task of lethal defense had fallen to me, yet another wrong on my list.) An old looking postcard, the ocean somewhere- Papua New Guinea? Mostly, though, it was neat and didn’t have that much in it. A fitting place for someone who was never in one place for long and had always lived that way. I wouldn’t say I’m like that, but now that I have begun traveling the world to set things right and buy back my fraudulent items, I can say that going from place to place doesn’t always have to be so bad. I think it’s about the choice in doing it. 

“Princess,” came the accented voice of my old friend, who’d been next to me. It was getting into the evening and we’d been resting, hanging out aimlessly on the couch, and inside an unkept bedroom like old days. Not so odd, I told myself, not so bad. We’d readjusted quickly and I tried not to think about whether or not that was bad. Slava said something about not wanting to tire me out and overwhelm me with the tourist crowds and staying inside, but I wondered about her, too. I still felt ill, but slightly, very slightly had gotten better since Amsterdam, which I couldn’t believe had been so recent. Each day in the past few weeks had been like years.

“What is it, Slava,” I half-asked in return, exhausted. Even though we were inside, she still smelled like snow, like the cold.

“You are awake, feeling well, now?” she asked, her rough voice asking me the question with the sort of understanding kindness I never expected from others.

I nodded. “I mean…not really, but you know. All things considered, fine. What about you?”

We’d gotten to her place in Antwerp after a commute that had been short but didn’t feel that way especially in my state, and was rough and dragged out and I’d kept dry heaving and sighing at her “I can’t believe I always allow you to rope me into doing completely insane shit like this, and when I feel this fucking sick” while she told Gyuri to not drive so fast, for my sake. Gyuri got a pretty entertaining show, I suppose; when I started thinking about how I’d left everyone I knew without a trace and lied to Hobie for years and put him in danger of legal trouble and committed fraud and stole a priceless painting, I tried to talk about how I had things to take care of when I got home and Slava started lecturing me about how “if those posh society papers try and say you are seduced from the altar-” actually, I was pretty sure they all had thought I’d seduced my fiancé for the money- “let them, they cannot stop you from living your life and you are too old to listen to all that, I never listen to anyone who calls me-” and I’d said, “what the fuck, that is absolutely not what I meant” but I supposed she was right in that I was also thinking about all that too. She then began talking to me about some nightclub she wanted to show me- were those even open on Christmas? Some place she described as “like a disco song” that seemed extremely expensive.

She’d said, “hey Gyuri! I do not think she knows how we met!” and explained how there was a period when she tried to stop all drugs and be lawful. She went off to Miami with a false ID and papers, didn’t tell anyone or leave a trace, and for months took a day job at a busy beachside tourist shop and a night job dancing at a club, not making a lot of money, but getting by. (There was something wistful in her voice when she talked about it. “New life for me, like being a new person without drugs, stealing. Would you believe that was me? Law abiding citizen, mostly. Shop was not very high paying but always something happening. People from all over the world! Very interesting. At the club? Hard work, but the girls were great, we were all friends. I was a success. Should have seen me, Princess! But I get myself fired. Of course,” she said, as if disappointed in herself. “I hit a man because he is accosting Angela my friend, another dancer, hurting her wrist. So I am wandering around the city wondering now what, trying to hail a taxi back to my place. Gyuri comes up, before he went back to New York, unlicensed cab driver down there, I say, hah, very illegal! But he gives me a ride. Soon it is like we knew each other for years! We talk for a while,” she shrugged, started to look away, “we become friends, you see…Soon I get my last paycheck from shop, was just seasonal job for tourist season. They do not offer to keep me…” she shrugged. “Pretty soon, no money. Past months are like a dream forgotten when waking up. But we get back on our feet. I am back to business as regular. You know.” Something resigned, a concession, about the way she said the last part, like the way she would say _I am a thief_.)

And if I had wanted to, I couldn’t have gotten a word in as she showed me around once we arrived (“you are _always_ welcome here! But better if it is when I am home”), but after I’d made her show me her gunshot wound so I could check on it. Afterwards she made me lie down, “get some rest, you did not rest at all in car despite looking like death, I think you have cold? Is always going around this time of year. Very unfortunate but I will take care of you,” and I’d told her, how could I have rested on the road and isn’t she the one who just got shot so shouldn’t she worry for herself? Unfortunately, that was when I threw up for what was at least the last time after Amsterdam and I’d had to bathe and put on some of Slava’s clothes that fit wrong on me while she washed mine, and some of the sheets, in the machine she kept in her flat (“laundromat is too far to walk to while carrying all the baskets”). She’d stayed there with me to make sure I was all right and she told me that she was thinking of how when I was sick on my blackout nights she would bathe me and pull me upwards if I went under the water and tried to stay underneath and drown (“I would say to you, I need you alive, even if you do not like life, and Popchyk needs his mamochka, and drowning is terrible way to die, and I am right here so the law will come for me for not stopping you because that would be criminal, and if you die those terrorists succeeded, so let yourself live”). “Have we not come so far”, she’d said, “now you are the one to save me and after all I have done to you.” I said nothing to that. “Tell me the water is not too cold, eh Princess, I had trouble with the company before?” She gave me a shot of penicillin anyway (“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” “If I did not, would I do it to you?”) and made me some soup while we watched movies on her almost unused-looking couch that was the texture of one of those giant reclining chairs at movie theaters. _Valley of the Dolls w_ as playing and I said “story of my fucking life” and remembered how many times I’d watched it in college when I felt alone; then there was some odd German-language fairy tale movie that appeared to have been made in the seventies which amused us but we didn’t pay much attention; _It’s A Wonderful Life_ was one we remembered watching together in Vegas and that got us reminiscing together but then edging towards beginning to talk about the drugs, and I understood her, even if I wished she wasn’t saying what she did. I think that is how it goes with us sometimes- understanding something we don’t want to be there.

“I am fine,” she told me, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Enjoying the holy holiday.” I wasn’t sure if that was a joke but I had a feeling it wasn’t, given how she’d been talking earlier in Amsterdam.

I was next to her on the bed as the television she’d moved into her bedroom broadcasted some Dutch-language news program; where the video footage showed the Antwerp traffic, the crowded holiday season roads. The language reminded me of what I’d just left, the incomprehensible New York world I’d been drawn into, full of families whose high status dated back to the days of New Amsterdam. _No man will ever want you. Maybe some of the really awful ones if you’re lucky but then, that’s what you earned. Kit never wanted you, just to make his mother happy_. I’d been thinking about reevaluating, if not entirely repudiating all of, some of these thoughts I’d been so firm in for so long, during the days and since I’d shut myself in that Amsterdam hotel room like the despondent undead Countess in “The Lady of the House of Love.” I may have felt deathly, but as my mother’s visitation had conveyed to me, I was not yet done with life, even though I was done with living in a falsified relic of a lifestyle, done enclosing myself in a colonial façade, frozen in some falsified past that never was. Sometimes I worried if my mother wouldn’t love me, sometimes I worried I was just doomed to become another version of my father, and sometimes I remembered Xandra telling me something: “I never see you with any boys. Well, let me tell you, from experience: apparently, you look like you’re going to make some real mistakes later on, and you’re not a little girl. You can’t afford to be naïve.”

(Later, the last time I’d heard from her, on the phone, in between everything- the shit about my mom, and my being like my dad, and her stolen drugs, in a sardonic and annoyed tone but I could tell what she had to say, she meant: “Can I give you some information, woman to woman, kid?” it wasn’t a question, and I thought, oh here we fucking go, but I let her talk. “I’d tell your friend the same, but hey, she’s been around the block enough already to not need the basics on it from me. So what I’m telling you is,” drawn out and grandiose like her and my dad’s birth charts, “you think running away from your life will get rid of your past, well, it just makes your past stretch out even longer behind you.”)

I’d been thinking of Xandra and our time with her and what she might have seen when she looked at us ever since a few weeks before in the bar Slava had told me about what happened after I’d left, how she’d cried at Xandra’s door. And Slava imitated the blank, wide eyed look Xandra got when she’d had enough coke in her system and told me that later in the day, after she wasn’t mad anymore about the stealing- she’d said, more soothing, “calm down, kid, you’re fine, your dad won’t find you here”- Xandra started to act like it had been her generous idea all along to bring Slava in and said, albeit repeated to me in Slava’s accent, “I’m doing this because Larry always liked you and he would have hated to know you were out alone on the streets with no one. I wouldn’t want that either, your father never gave you a chance in this world, did he? We’ll figure something out. Look at you. You must think you’re the toughest girl in the whole city. Well, let me tell you something. You don’t even know anything about this country, or being an adult woman. You think you know danger because you saw some drugs in real life and not just the movie screen, you think you’ve lived wild because you snuck a beer into Spring Fling or whatever it is you and your little friend do. You think you get America because you saw some little Hallmark hick town with a population of one hundred in Alaska, well kid, Vegas _is_ America and you better not go out onto these streets alone because you might never come out of there alive, and I know what kind of people you and your father ran with and I’m sure you know they’re never your friends for long. So you stay here for a while, go knock yourself out and make yourself at home, and I would have given her the same advice if I thought she’d bother to listen, but if Theodora turns on Unsolved Mysteries one day and recognizes your face in the reconstruction sketch when they do their show on Vegas Strip Jane Doe don’t say I didn’t fucking warn you.” With a smile on her face, like she was talking about dancing wildly at a New Year’s party, Slava said that speech had made her cry all over again, so Xandra told her to go watch TV and gave her a mini-bag of chips for dinner, and told her everything would be okay, and, nauseated, I remembered how Hobie never asked me if I knew what happened to Slava, who he compared to Little Orphan Annie, I think he didn’t want to make me think about it, he could tell and deep down I knew if I believed anything bad had happened I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself for not dragging her with me, pleading with her to come that one last time.

I told her when we reunited that my Russian class had made me think of her nonstop, but the truth was, I saw her everywhere: When I saw a Soviet Ukrainian flag in an antique store, and I was staring at it for who knows how long, and the saleswoman, an older Russian woman, asked me where I was from, assuming I was from an ex-Soviet country, I suppose. When I went to the Lower East Side and saw a young dark-haired woman shouting and laughing into a RAZR phone in Polish, happily saying words I recognized as obscenities. Some more difficult memories to contend with. When I was listening to music with Philip once because we wanted to go for a walk in the snowfall but his leg was bothering him so we stayed in and we were so close but not touching and in my vintage Gunne Sax I felt like we were Herbert James Draper’s _Tristan and Isolde_ , wispy Isolde’s arms supplicating and her face like there were no words that could do her thoughts justice as she stood in wait, and “Silver Springs” came on and I smiled and he said he loved the song too and he kissed me and I froze and didn’t do anything but didn’t tell him to stop and I thought of how every time after this motel trip we went on, whenever we heard Stevie Nicks I would do Slava’s accent and say “Ah, fuck, Stevie, loud woman,” like in the mall food court when “Rhiannon” came on and at this boring school dance when “Landslide” played at the end and she’d laugh and say, “fuck you, Princess, we were both startled from our beds when that fucking song came on!” and Philip asked me if I was all right and I said, yes, but we never did go further. And when I read _Lolita_ for class it took me halfway through to realize I should probably feel worse than I did about my Ethan, first real “boyfriend” who was twelve years older than me when I was in high school, if I had actually been harmed by it I should maybe cry about it or something instead of being numb and telling myself it wasn’t great but it was fine and I wanted it and maybe this meant I really was as bad as I thought I was, what was so hard about finding some nice normal boy my own age, but the line “ _You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go”_ struck me for other reasons. And upon returning to New York I’d begun collecting fashion magazines from past years because they often had my mother’s advertising work in them and I would also inspect the pages of _Vogue_ and _Harper’s Bazaar_ for 90s grunge girls, who came before us but were like us, with their oversized clothes and exposed limbs, there she was, I thought wistfully, there we are, even if we didn’t have McQueen money and we never got to run through a grass field so rich and emerald green like Naomi and Kate did in those editorials but then, forget the 90s, I guess we were both more like Gia anyway. And ironically given what Xandra had said without my knowing, I went through a pill-fueled period of obsessively researching Jane Does from the American Southwest and Texas and California and even Alaska, spending hours online until the screen made my eyes hurt reading case details and theories about each one, pretending nothing was wrong when Hobie asked if I was feeling all right and I just told him I was remembering things again- things we did and things we said that I had a different understanding of as an adult, not wanting any of them to be her even though I always knew I’d never find her on those lists not so much because I was certain she was alive and more because I was certain if she was dead then no one would ever find her. I realized my obsession was based less in possibilities but in the fact that I saw those Jane Does as us and us as them, as kindred spirits. And I read and watched and listened to everything Philip recommended to me because it made me feel close to him; when I watched _Twin Peaks_ it all felt so ominously familiar, even though I tried to just focus on the soundtrack Philip had praised and when I saw _Fire Walk With Me_ every scene between Laura and Donna felt like an unearthed memory especially because I think some of it may as well have been; I remembered a dark house party, some guy I didn’t know owned the house, with flickering broken lights and being lain on a couch hardly unable to move I don’t know what was in my system and the music so loud I could only hear the bass thumping so I could feel it, and Slava deranged from drugs shouting across the room at no one and then at the guy on top of me touching me and undressing me, screaming things I didn’t understand in fuck knows what language she was attempting while her nose bled and her eyes were crazed as a wild animal’s, and Kotku hissing shit-shit-shit and dragging us outside to safety and the next day when I woke up we were with Kotku on this playground bench and she looked at me seriously, my exhausted reflection in the pink-tinted sunglasses shades that rested on her forehead, and she sounded so tired when she told me I was like her and Slava (but first she’d told Slava, who had a long cut on her face and was now dead-eyed as a zombie from one of the movies I used to watch with Andy, “we’re not doing this again, Slava, there are some places and people you should stay the fuck away from, you might not care about yourself but I know you care about other people, and I know it’s not your fault because you lived through some of this shit too, but don’t you ever want anything better?” I think she was very angry, but not at us) – she said she knew all three of us had lived some things alone, and we had to support each other but one day I wouldn’t have the two of them by my side, and I had to be really brave and know I could get through anything if I wanted to, but right now I wasn’t going to get hurt and I was safe, and I cried and she looked so tired and she nodded all slow and wrapped her jacket she’d covered me with tighter around my shoulders and said, her hoarse voice all soft, yeah baby girl, I know, I know how it is, and put her arm on my shoulders as I put my face to her neck and tried to hold Slava’s slack, cold hand. And Kotku got her name from this ankle tattoo of a black cat she had, and she caught me looking at it and told me, knowingly, like advice from a born Wild Western Vegas girl: “Cats always land on their feet, New York Doll.” And every time after Vegas I saw cat tattoos I thought of Kotku, and Slava’s voice, her voice I heard years later, “I am reading society pages, boring as fuck, then I see your picture, and I say ah she is as always too beautiful but very shy! Looking away from camera! White furs and pale blue satins and you look just like Merle Oberon-” (I couldn’t refuse Mrs. Barbour’s gifts, she’d never gotten a daughter and I was trying to be hers, and really it wasn’t so hard, it was like seeing land in the horizon after years at sea, the way I would take tea and sometimes pills with her and she’d say “this is good for nerves” and she would look at me like we understood one another, because really, we did) “-And you are with rich boy, and I see the caption says you are the fiancée. I think to myself, now you are famous, and this caption if you ask me can say more of you than that you are future wife. But then I see rich boy’s name is Kit. I know it is short for something but what the fuck is that? Your name is the name of an empress and your husband is going to be named like a fucking candy we stole from 7/11?” And Kit had introduced me to some fourteen year old cousin, Tinsley, and she and her friend came along to a wedding reception dress fitting because they were getting dresses at the same store and I didn’t realize fourteen year olds looked that young (at that age Slava had said, “everyone thinks I am twenty,” even though I’m pretty sure no one actually thought that) and those girls were giggling over how they would study flash cards for prep school midterms and what Christian Louboutin nail polish they wanted to wear at the wedding and how they hoped the Vuitton shoes they were getting would make them look as grown up as Theodora, I thought wait that was me, even if I always either felt too young or too old, but when I was their age I didn’t give a fuck about studying techniques or nails or growing up, all I wanted to do was die and for all I knew Slava had already done that before I could.

But now, very much alive, Slava turned her head to look at me directly and smiled like she was ready to have a good time and had some ideas for that, as she’d done so often- the way she looked the time we stole a dog hat from Petco for Popchyk because it was Halloween and we thought he would look cute in it (“He looks like Paris Hilton’s dog all dressed up”; “Who?”), the way she looked when she said “you are going to show them how smart you are!” before I had to do my final presentation in class but I stared at the floor and had to repeat “Sequoyah wrote the Tsalagi syllabary” twice because no one could hear me because I was too busy remembering how my mother said she always wanted to learn the language and we could learn it together, even the time just a couple days ago when she’d came to my hotel room with the reward money, or recently before that, when she showed up to the party wearing this strappy dress that I recognized as a vintage Versace that had been featured in an old Vogue my mother had owned. Her hair was still wild and uncombed and gleaming like she’d soaked in chlorine water- any of these distant Barbour cousins may have thought she was some jet-setting foreign fashion model I’d befriended from selling antiques to, and read the Paris Review at cafes with, and for a second it was like no time had gone by, even though we were no longer kids, and now looked like the wife and the mistress. She’d dressed like Sargent’s Madame X gone rock n’ roll, and I’d come to my engagement party dressed up not, as a retro-admiring college classmate once said I always dressed like, “a librarian in the 1950s”, but in a floor length vintage velvet gown that in fact came from Ralph Lauren. (Then again, I’d always felt drawn to high fashion and as I grew older and my mother’s absence grew longer I grew to appreciate the art of it more and felt closer to her when I learned more about it, so now that I was almost in the Barbour family, I had the opportunity to dress better and mostly enjoyed doing so- but the amount of attention on me always made me revert back to my insecurities. I felt right when I could tell the right kind of men were looking at me and I felt like for the first time in my life it was happening regularly, so I must have been improving- until I wondered if they were only staring because they heard rumors. I thought about something Slava had once said in our youth- “I am not pretty as you or other girls we know. My teeth are bad, I have scars, my body is nothing special. But the men, they like me best.”) The dress was a dark brown color with florals, and it did compliment my dark complexion and hair (I did inherit some things from my mother), but it did not cover my arms when I usually chose clothes that did and I was terrified people were staring at my arms in search of track marks, and my chignon showed off my neck and face in a way I felt uncomfortable with around all those people and the look didn’t quite go with my mother’s earrings, and I didn’t look as much like her as I wished. Philip, however, had effortlessly looked like some kind of bohemian artist, with his face from a pre-Raphaelite painting, like some old fashioned musician, and I’d recognized his L’Occitane cologne: it had to be a new bottle because a while ago, in what I now recognize as a regrettable decision, I’d stolen his old, half-empty one and daubed it on myself when I was in bed alone because it made me feel like he was there protecting me. And Kit looked like a model for Brooks Brothers, perfect as a picture, as always, like he did so no one would know how hard it was for him, even me, and I remembered learning all the work that goes into creating advertisements. Ironically he was as sure of himself as Andy had been in his own odd way. At the party, when he saw Slava, I’d been nervous for his response but he said he was happy to see me enjoying myself with friends. (None of the planned bridesmaids were people I really knew.) I wasn’t sure if I was enjoying myself but I let that one go. He’d been by my side throughout this whole planning process, in fact, he and Mrs. Barbour had basically planned the whole thing even though the bride was supposed to do that, but I had no idea what a bride was supposed to do and the two of them rarely left me alone, never made me have whole days alone with all the society ladies and bridal tailors that made me so nervous. (Although looking back, Hobie realized how nervous it all made me and sometimes told me he wanted my opinion on something at work, I suppose so I’d have an excuse to get out of something that I particularly didn’t want to go to, like the times I had to be surrounded by people watching me have clothes put on and taken off of me.) I had to give him, and of course his mother, that. “Kid, don’t sign your life over for the first guy that’s halfway nice to you,” Xandra had told me once, almost concerned, like she thought I would do exactly that. I certainly could have done far, far worse.

I did try to make Kit happy, I tried to make myself happy by aiming for this perfect marriage, but we were both trying to make his mother happy and I suppose sometimes making someone else happy isn’t always satisfactory, even to the person you’re doing it for. We had some real bad days. On some days that I’d thought were good but really weren’t, my happiness with him or at least the relationship’s existence was a bitter, hard-won, desperate kind of thing: when I went to get full-body waxes but I knew my body had been through far worse pains so I didn’t even care and I thought _can any of these high-society girls handle it as well as I can!_ And when I’d have clothes put on me and I’d look like someone in my mother’s ads wearing the kind of things she could never afford and I’d think _Philip’s British cow wishes she could pull this off_ or when Kit would escort me into the bedroom and kiss me excitedly as he carried me to the bed and I’d think triumphantly _fuck everyone who thinks he should leave me!_ I felt happy on our truly good days because I finally felt like I was doing something right- like _I_ wasn’t completely wrong. We were as perfectly stiff and posed as Barbie and Ken. Looking back, I’m sure Mrs. Barbour would eventually have known her own son well enough and likely me as well to see we were selling a fraud, one that Town & Country bought, but a fraud all the same. And in my experience, you can only sell fakes if the client isn’t observant enough.

“I think I can hear my neighbors in flat next door…” Slava waved her hand, laughing a little. Half-asleep, I snapped out of my distraction. “Very Happy Christmas!” I smiled a little, with my mouth closed.

“Do you remember Presidents’ Day?” I asked, and I saw she was about to open her mouth but I kept going. I don’t know if it was the fact that I was still exhausted and out of it or the fact that I just couldn’t stop myself from reminiscing. “My dad and Xandra went to some five star hotel in town for the holiday.” ‘You and Colonel Ninotchka don’t do anything _I_ wouldn’t do now,’ Xandra had said walking out the door, waving without looking back at us, and my dad had leaned over and told me like I was a way younger kid be careful what strangers I talk to and in the moment I thought, look at how little he knew me (just like when he told me if I ever had “ladies’ issues” to talk about I should go to Xandra, advice I never took even though she sometimes offered it unsolicited- “if some creep won’t leave you girls alone just say you already have boyfriends,” “whatever the little Russki did in Europe, you do know that hitchhiking is dangerous here, right? It’s not like a taxi in New York”; it was clear he had no idea what to do with me and sometimes just thought Xandra would step in or Slava and I would go to her if there was an issue) and later I realized he meant the kind of people he knew from his dealings. Slava had laughed, reassuring my father that we were both always careful, like they had some kind of inside joke, which at the time annoyed me but now it just makes me depressed to think about how happy she must have been that my father, despite everything he did wrong, looked at her and saw a kid, and how unused she must have been to adult men giving her something so small, so basic, as that. “It was one of the times he had money,” what my dad would have seen as the good times, “we found a few hundred dollar bills in a drawer, and we walked down the highway to that motel...”

“Of course I remember,” she told me, more solemn now, her voice strong and soft, a slight Australian inflection on the last couple syllables in “remember”. “False names, we used.” I did laugh then, even though I still felt ill, remembering how the man at the desk, who wasn’t even listening to us and paid more attention to the conservative radio channel that was on blasting some rant about “freedom fries”, handed us the guestbook for us to write in “Honey Ryder” and “Sylvia Trench.” How much had stayed the same? In the Amsterdam hotel I actually did use my real name even though this may not have been the best choice given the circumstances, but for reasons I did not ask, Slava’s passport said “Mariya Zelenko”.

“We broke cheap little table because _Coyote Ugly_ was playing on the television and we tried to copy the dance to that rodeo song,” she continued, laughing a bit. For once it had been both of us on top of the table; this time it wasn’t like some of the nights I half-remembered, Slava thrashing to some hard rock or synthy Top 40 song on top of some kitchen table or countertop or car, getting down on her hands and knees throwing her head back and laughing, calling _come up with me Princess_ while I sat slumped and my intoxicated gaze flickered back and forth from her to my Solo cup and I said almost inaudible _no I’m fucking tired please Slava I want to go home,_ and all the guys, yelling over me, said _hell yeah!_

I had a migraine and put my fingers underneath my glasses and to my eyelids to gently massage them, trying not to laugh at ‘rodeo song’. “You mean ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’?” I said, recalling how we’d laughed and swore as the motel table’s leg had collapsed beneath us and we’d tried in vain to put it back together and decided to hide the whole thing in a corner next to the dresser and Slava had animatedly ranted about Tblisi in “real Georgia” and how she’d love to go there and to all these other places she’d never been but wanted to like Yakutsk and Ulaanbaatar and Sarajevo and I should see them too and get the hell out of America sometime, and we decided “Bohuslava and Theodora” sounded like two old church ladies from the small and ancient Russian church in Slava’s town in Alaska and if we were old and stuck there instead of being young and stuck here we’d be passing a flask between the two of us as some black-robed priest went on for hours; and the traveling Mormon missionaries next door asked us later that they had heard noises, had something happened. We took Popchyk for a walk down the roadside and stopped at a gas station and asked the attendant for directions to the highway McDonald’s and she wouldn’t tell us, “you sure you’re not runaways, girls,” and Slava had said with her bizarre brand of earnestness “of course not Miss, we went out walking dog, we want to get dinner and then go right back to motel” and the lady stared at us for a while and said are you _sure_ you’re not runaways but she gave us the directions anyway, and we had dinner and poured a bottle of cold water into a cup for Popchyk to go with dog food from the gas station convenience store. We’d smoked and jumped on the bed and pulled each other off it to the ground as the neon lights outside flickered and shadowed us in red and blue like some Western Noir movie scene, and lain down with Popchyk between us and fallen asleep the first night sharing headphones but woke up because the music was still on and the soft Velvet Underground album had ended and “Edge of Seventeen” blasted us awake and Slava had yelled “Ah Stevie, fuck! Princess that woman is loud!” and I’d laughed so hard I felt sick and we went outside to look at the stars flat on our backs on the pavement, and I wondered how many times my mother had seen stars like this out in her travels and I thought of how she’d told me her father had told her to always look at the moon whenever she felt homesick or sad, and both of us were reassured that it seemed to be long after even this group of creepy guys at the motel who we’d made a point to avoid during our stay (“some of these guys,” Slava had told me, “just are not worth even threatening to call police on. That encourages them. I know you are from the big city and you have seen a lot and know this probably. Still. Best to stay distant sometimes.”) had gone in, or away. And my mouth felt disgusting from the Coke I’d drank from the vending machines even after brushing my teeth again and again so when it rained, real torrents like I’d never seen in the desert before, I didn’t even move, I just opened my mouth and let the cold water fall in and let the desert rain soak me, and Slava asked me “hey Theodora what the fuck are you trying to drown yourself, no no get up”, and pulled me upwards and I laughed at what I thought was a dumb joke and said “no, calm down, I’m washing my teeth, that soda is like tar, just look at my tongue” but later, years later, I realized she was serious. So we went back inside and tried to be quiet because the old salesman in the room next to us Slava had nicknamed Dedushka was nice to us “young ladies” and told us in a kind of paternal way to be careful out there and he sold us candy bars that were better than the honestly kind of shitty stuff in the vending machines but at nighttime we heard him, certainly drunk, wailing, sobbing, howling alone to the night. And on the last night we were walking Popchyk around the parking lot when we heard something going on and we saw two of the rooms were being occupied by four women having a kind of party among themselves and they asked who we were and if we wanted to join, so we did. And they told us they were from Reno on their way to Vegas, and they let us have the last two Coronas in the six pack and played with Popchyk and told us we were so adorable, and we told them, so they wouldn’t be concerned, we were eighteen, we’d just aged out of foster care and were going to my cousin in Kansas so we could get waitress jobs at the diner he had a position at, and we toasted to our new lives, the start of our real lives, and Slava addressed the nice women but looked straight at me, and said, like a vow, “now we will never have to go any place, live with any person, do any thing we don’t want to,” and Popchyk ran around on the pink carpet and one of them, her name was Danielle, told us, I wish I had friends when I was your age the way you have each other, you’re going to love being out in the world, being grown. 

“Yah, that was it. Little Popchyk came along, we managed to get him in without anyone’s noticing because we put him in the bag instead of bringing so many drinks, motel was so bad and I had great time,” she said. “We both did.” She was very quiet for a moment, and stared at me, the kind of look you’d call a thousand-mile stare. I think between the two of us, I’m not the only one who doesn’t always say everything and exactly what is on my mind. “You did not try to harm yourself that holiday,” she said, like she was breaking very serious news to me, or making a confession. I never remembered trying to do so, but then, we’d stayed the weekend at that Lightning Motel and lived mostly off what the vending machines had, which didn’t include alcohol. I didn’t get to drink enough to black out. If she wasn’t so dead serious I might have said something like, are you going to tell me what you really do for a job, but sure, I’m the one who needs to go on a new path.

“Yeah,” I said quietly, looking down at my hands. My engagement ring was off. I inhaled, my throat sore. “I just want to say that I didn’t forget everything. I didn’t black everything out.”

But sometimes I’d tried to. It was easier to not remember. It made everything I’d done less real for me, if not for everyone else. In my youth I’d gotten used to blackouts, and with them, the things I did before. My later high school years and even my early college years in New York were a blur of reading assignments I immersed myself in or neglected and house parties I disappeared into and class discussions that made me want to slam my head against the wall. I didn’t get called a _nice girl_ very often then. But then, blackouts were easiest when it was just a blank spot. There were times when they had consequences. Like how for two years Slava remembered everything I forgot or pretended to forget. Or the time in college I woke up in my boyfriend Brendan’s dorm bed stinging with scratches all over my arms and neck and face and I saw dried blood under my fingernails and felt bruises all over me and I felt so sick and he was all dressed and hadn’t been asleep I could tell and he took my by the shoulder and asked me what I took and I said I didn’t even know what it was, and he asked me if I remembered anything and I said no, why, and he said all incredulous still gripping my shoulder, you really don’t fucking remember, and I said, what did I get you mad enough for you to want to hit me when I’m not even up, and he looked at me long and hard and said in a way he probably thought was helpfully giving me a wake-up call, “you’re a sick and mentally disturbed person, Theo.” I actually laughed. “I’m at my wit’s end. We shouldn’t see each other anymore and you really need professional help. I let you sleep here but I’m calling you a cab home now because your foster dad can take care of you better than I fucking know how, although I think he found you a little late.” He’d thought Hobie was, in as he once said, my “gay foster dad, not that I’m saying something is wrong with your situation, I’m aware not everyone can come from the same privileges,” an ‘awareness’ he just loved to reiterate all the time when it came to the subject of anything to do with my or Hobie’s lives. “I’m sure he tried very hard with what he had,” he continued and as I made my haphazard way out of bed, with my throat raw and hoarse, I told Brendan he didn’t know a goddamn thing about Hobie, and he told me: “and you don’t know anything about yourself.” And when I got home Hobie immediately asked if I was all right and if I needed a doctor and who had attacked me and I told him I was so sorry, because it was all me, I cried and apologized for being the way I was, and told him I needed to go to bed. But Brendan was wrong. Even when I didn’t know what I’d done, I knew all about myself. I just preferred to forget every time I learned.

And before that in my youth I was always learning and forgetting, had a reputation for it- people asking me in school in worried tones if I was okay the night after wild parties I didn’t remember; that or people trying not to laugh. I was guilty-by-association in Vegas due to being best friends with the girl with one of the worst reputations in the whole school who freaked out some people but not enough to stop them from talking about her, who supposedly was with all the guys but none of them kept her around long enough to be their girlfriend (or she didn’t keep them), who mostly hung out with me but also sometimes hung out with the other girls who had bad reputations, like Kotku, who really wasn’t bad. I definitely preferred hanging out with her and Slava over being a third wheel with Slava and whatever dumb guy who was into her for the day, or the night. I heard some things about her getting into fights but apparently one of the times she just got too into it when she had to do some battle scene from _Romeo and Juliet_ in Drama class (“the only class that isn’t boring,” she said) and the other time when she and this other girl were both high at a party and got into this big fight but they didn’t stay angry with each other even if they weren’t friends (“I just get so fucking mad sometimes and I wish I didn’t,” she said). People called her a “slut” -I said this was disrespectful to women, remembering what my mother once told me about how it’s not right to attack women or call them names just because people might disapprove of their lives (over the years, the lesson made a lasting impression, except when it came to my judgment of myself), and Slava shrugged, in her “the world is like that” way, “but by their definition all of us _are_. Who gives a toss? I will not apologize for my life and neither does Kotku. You should not either.” I was shy around Kotku, I think because she was a few years older, and so pretty and intense with her streaked black-and-orange hair like a Bratz doll and sharp neon eyes that I thought made up for her being so small (smaller than even me and Slava), and clearly saw me as a kid, the way she’d call me “baby girl,” and told me hearing me swear was like hearing a little puppy swear, and I’d heard some rumors. But she liked me and I liked her when we did get to know each other, and when the Rite Aid didn’t take her for an afterschool job and all three of us knew it was because she and her mom lived in a motel I said “fuck them then, that manager reminds me of my mom’s old boss, you can get a better job, I mean, you’re really good at manicures, you could work at a salon, you’re old enough for a license,” she looked at me and told me I was really sweet and I shouldn’t ever let anyone take that out of me; and once after a weird visit from Mr. Silver I said if my dad went to jail I’d end up in the system and Slava said she’d never let anyone take me and Kotku told me _baby, I used to be so scared of that, I’m sorry_. Before we got to know each other I think she thought I was kind of naive, as she once told me, frank and spoken like she was sad I had to hear this, “most bad people out there, aren’t the same kind of bad people who hurt you. No one bothers to stop them or get them in trouble.” One time when we were all stoned Kotku said, _sometimes when bad things end, good things happen_ and I’d never thought of it like that and I said _sometimes good things and bad things happen together_ and we all agreed. 

When I tried to text Kotku’s cell phone after I left town, I’d found the number was out of service. Only recently did I realize it wouldn’t be so hard to track her down. As an adult, I look back, deeply unsettled, remembering she’d had a boyfriend who was twenty-six when we were all in high school. I’d thought she was this cool older girl who in a way I wanted to be as confident as, but she was just a kid too. It’s hard to think of yourself as one when you are sometimes, especially when you don’t really get to be like other kids. I was always for some reason pretty sure Kotku (who Hobie would have said “had weathered storms”) was, between the three of us, the one who ended up mostly all right. She probably has. She didn’t try to forget everything as it was happening.

It’s really not like everyone hated me and Slava. We had acquaintances, people who didn’t know us but were nice to us, teachers who wanted us to do well even when we weren’t, like Mrs. Spear (I recalled once Slava saying, high and half joking, if her father ever got himself killed, maybe Mrs. Spear would adopt her). We had great times, and sometimes I felt like I’d never been more free, even if I wasn’t happy – maybe that’s what made me understand how great our time together was. It’s just so easy to remember the bad parts, then and later. Over the years people, in Vegas or New York, sometimes said things about me which were less suggestive and more blatantly referencing things I didn’t even want to talk about to deny. (Later, in my senior year of high school, there were strange rumors about something me and this exchange student Irina did at a party- I didn’t remember, and I never asked her about it, and I avoided her after that even though we’d been friendly, and I thought of it in college when a classmate recommended I see _Bridesmaids_ because it was “the perfect movie to see with girlfriends,” probably meaning just friends who are girls, but I said, smiling, that I wasn’t gay and I sure hoped she didn’t get the wrong idea). I did try to be grateful for the fact that at least in Vegas the school wasn’t monitoring some supposed “eating disorder” like in New York and into adulthood I hated eating in front of other people, knowing there was a good likelihood they were trying to evaluate whether or not I had one disorder or another; I remembered the sanctimonious, guiding tone of a school psychologist- _I don’t think we like ourselves very much, Theodora_ \- little did she know soon enough I wouldn’t be able to keep down half my food, even if I wanted to, from all the drinking I was doing. And I told myself what Slava and I did, didn’t count, and I barely listened to the many, many rumors, even though I think she alluded to some things she didn’t know how to talk about then, even when I asked her. I became used to burying my memories to withstand them. When I returned to New York and met Ethan, I told myself this was the first real time, and he told me I was mature beyond my years for listening so well, when I felt like I had nothing I wanted to say. And when he touched me and drank with me and said _you look so innocent, on the outside…_ I would remember being called “Trainwreck Theo” and one of “those girls with the weird names, you know that freaky Russian and the weird girl who always follows her around, you know I heard they _live together_ ,” as fate would have it those kids would be kissing Slava’s ring and paying for her designer clothes and doctor’s visits, either too afraid of her or of losing her business to say the same kind of rumors again, but before all that they also said things that I felt were much worse than even that Sex Slava nickname that was whispered and catcalled and written on bathroom walls, and I’d wonder if I was going further or closer from that, but as much as I hated myself it felt right to do so, and it also felt like I was doing what I was supposed to do, in a way, and I couldn’t ever remember feeling like that, not because I’d forgotten but because I knew it was the first time.

“I know you didn’t, Theodora. Not everything.” There was a certain frankness in her voice, the way she said my real name. (When I’d introduced myself to her years ago as Theo and told her it was short for Theodora she’d asked me if I’d heard of “Empress Theodora. Very beautiful actress who became queen in old days.” I wasn’t sure if she was complimenting me or teasing me or both. When people told me I was smart they sometimes said it in a way that I felt implied I couldn’t be that and beautiful, and I was closer to intelligence than attractiveness. I’d never thought I was ugly but I had never seen myself as very beautiful even when Kit told me I was and he was the first man who ever did. Slava had said it a thousand times but that was different and didn’t count; regularly, sober and in other altered states, she told me I was her _sweet beautiful Princess, even though you are so judgmental and make very bad decisions_. I’d gotten “cute” in I suppose the way a puppy is, and “hot” in high school, and Brendan’s choice of wording was “sensuous”, and a semester after we broke up he made a comment in our literature class about how unfortunate it is that so many young women think Sylvia Plath’s works are instruction manuals, which really summarizes our relationship. It definitely didn’t help when one of the bridal prep makeup artists said some deeply offensive “compliments” about my “unique look” that even then had me thinking that my mother definitely wouldn’t have felt right about everything I was going through for the sake of the marriage. “Very beautiful girl, you should see how she usually wears her hair,” Slava had told Philip and I’d frozen completely, thinking what the fuck is she doing please let her shut up oh she never lets me hear the end of anything. “Veronica Lake style, all over her face like that, like curtains.” I assumed she forgot about Veronica Lake’s drinking.)

“When you are ready, we can talk about all that. I think you make it clear to me before you were not ready. I know I am not without blame. I know we don’t see each other for a long time. We always meet up again. And I’m right here now. If you are ready.” I nodded, registering the words and their meanings, but I wasn’t sure, in that moment, if I was. I thought I was, but I didn’t quite feel like it. Maybe I just wasn’t used to it. I was starting to no longer think it was doing either of us any favors to not talk about certain things.

“I have to go back,” I said after a quiet moment. I was still very out of sorts. I hadn’t really tried talking about this since the car. “To New York. There are a lot of things I have to…set right.” If that was even possible. Slava nodded, half-smiling. “Not even just with Kit,” I said. “All the lies…” My stomach twisted as I got to thinking of the note I’d written Hobie, and how I would now have to explain everything to him. Slava, despite her hatred of greed, once said something to me, about money sometimes being freedom. I thought of the reward money, and the painting, and how she’d spent years hating herself. I forgave her and if I did the right thing, maybe some day, I’d have reason to forgive myself. I was already figuring out my buy-back plans, complicated and clear as math problems I felt satisfied by being able to figure out how to calculate. I’d need to go a lot of places, but then, that was fine. I could stand to leave New York for a while- I’d certainly have a scarlet letter in Park Avenue, I thought. Slava nodded solemnly, as if she was telling me my idea was correct. She hadn’t been written a note. I could never successfully lie to her. “Your arm,” I said, then.

She looked wryly at me, her eyes ringed with gray circles from a lack of sleep, looking both too old to be in her twenties and too young to have gone through all of this. I felt the same all the time. “You are very kind, more than you understand, to be so concerned always. But you know I always get through these things. I live by the sword. But I will live, Princess,” she said as if comforting me. And I thought of all the nights I’d blacked out where that was the least of what she had done. ‘I will live’. I pondered those words and how many things we’d lived through before one another, how many things we hadn’t processed yet, let alone spoken of.

I half-remembered one day in the pool, both of us high- I told Slava I wished I could be more like her. I can’t remember to this day if she said _no you don’t_ or _but you already are_. It was one of them and she said it deadly serious and addressed me by my real name as she said it. Depending on the day, one feels more real than the other. But now, recently, I understand it as something in the past.

“I guess you were right to compare my life to that story about the princess,” I said, laughing miserably, staring at the wall’s textured pink wallpaper. Someone on the news appeared to be shouting animatedly in Dutch about Flanders Province snowfalls. _Shut the fuck up,_ thought my migraine. “My engagement isn’t even off officially. For all I know they all think I’m still in New York and think it’s yet another time I got too nervous to go to some function.”

I wanted to cringe on behalf of myself but also Kit and his mother. _A gentleman of good breeding from Park Avenue should not be surprised Las Vegas women from such… necessitous backgrounds aren’t suitable for marriage_ , I imagined people like Anne de Larmessin saying. If I was going to be looked upon as unwelcome in my own family photographs by extended relatives for the rest of my life then maybe it was never going to work out. I was anxious to go back already but I wasn’t quite looking forward to dealing with all of that. The “it’s Advil for a headache” excuse was something I could tell only worked the first few times when people saw me taking pills- I remembered doing my father’s deny-deny-deny routine when some well-meaning busybody wife of one of Kit’s friends saw me, and told me if I ever had a problem then I’m not alone and I can always tell someone, so I told her, smiling, “I’m not sure what you’re asking, sorry” as I thought _fuck off_. I hoped there weren’t too many rumors going around. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t accept I was in pain so much that given the specifics of my life I didn’t want everyone to know they were right about me. And it wasn’t that everyone knew the full extent of my issues, but that, they assumed some (“she’s – a _sensitive_ young lady,” some cousin or aunt told a makeup artist when I came in late and a little anxious, and I’d been euphemistically called that word enough times to know when it was polite code for “unstable;” a photographer told me he was aware of what “conditions” people with “my experiences” tend to have and he would not use flash at the wedding if I thought it was “unadvisable”), guessed others (I’d been hiding out in a hotel lobby at some gala and one of the guests, someone I’d barely ever spoke to, came up and said something about how hard it must be for me to be approaching such an important part of my life without my mother, and an intoxicated, hurt part of me wanted to snap _do you really fucking think saying it to me like that helps_ ), and as happy as I tried to act around people, it wasn’t enough to override the fact that they knew what I went through, and of course, I was not doing just fine. As much as I lied to Hobie about it, I could tell he saw right through that one, and probably a lot others.

“Sometimes is not too late to do something…but that does not mean is the best decision,” Slava was saying, almost carefully, her hands out and her face peaceful, and I was saying at first under my breath but then louder “I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, I never do” and then “you don’t know, you don’t know how it is, you can just be you,” even though now I’m not sure if I was right in what I was assuming, in what I was saying without expressly saying. I remembered us being kids, Slava saying some offhanded comment about me not liking boys much and I overreacted saying she was the one who I was pretty sure hated men and maybe she wouldn’t if she didn’t hang out with the ones who were scary and dangerous and old, or at least the idiots from school, and she spent all her time with me and fucking slept next to me and held me at night and _sang_ to me, and she was always talking about how beautiful I was and I know I had never really had girls for friends before but I knew that even though it was normal for girls to call each other pretty they didn’t do it as much as she said it about me and not in the way she did, and she hung out with Kotku who everyone said liked to make out with other girls (which I did not at the time believe, because Kotku had never made advances to me or Slava, and even then I was beginning to understand that having a bad reputation meant people will say anything about you. Not that I actually cared if Kotku kissed girls. I knew everyone thought I should, so I kind of felt bad, but I didn’t think it was immoral, especially because I got a certain feeling from Slava as well. But I didn’t think it was true at the time. I did vaguely remember the three of us lying by the pool drinking Canada Dry mixed with vodka and Kotku cheek-kissed us like a French person saying “bonjour from Montreal, my weird little bonbons,” and we all laughed and Slava leaned down and kissed my stomach and teased “so you don’t throw up tonight,” and I’d felt all warm and shrieked and said shut up, and she put her arm around me like when we were sleeping and said “ah, I am as bad with drinking as you, so you do me next,” and Kotku tapped my nose with her finger like I was Popchyk). I’d remembered what I’d said, frequently and with remorse, over the years.

“I will not find a husband like you, sweet little Princess. I am just too much for a man to handle for long, they like me but they get scared! Hah! I cannot be claimed anyway. Hope I am not scaring _you_ ,” she’d said to me a few weeks ago. “I am independent woman, like the song from our youth. _Feministka_. Just ask me and Myriam! Is important for a woman to make her own money, I see now. You never know what will happen.” I wondered for a brief moment if my mother would have told me something similar. “Do not leave your work.” I wanted to say, well, I might be legally forced to. “This is not against the fiancé. Only that I never truly realize how badly I lived in the past, in my youth, until I become independent.” Is that how you’re framing it, I wanted to say. I’d been worried over what happened to her for years after I left and when she explained she made it seem like that was doing well and having a great time. But back then, she must have felt like she’d saved herself- she must have felt like she’d gotten her one chance to leave behind having to follow her father around the world where they were always hated, and leave behind being haunted by the specter of her mother’s open window and the sound of the pipe wrench, living among mold and locking doors, and taking beatings and facing him as he cried when he was there and having to throw herself on the mercy on strangers, kind or not- and I think there were more harmful people she’d met than she’d ever tell me- when he wasn’t. “Greed has destroyed so much of the world, yes. But money, is means for freedom in this world,” she said, solemnly, not quite happy, shrugging in that “that is life” way she had. As she concluded to me- “It is survival for women.” She took a drink and brightened after that. “But back to topic of your marriage, is fine. No offense to you.” I remembered some of the reassurances I’d asked of Kit and wondered how I’d become so insecure in who I was, how I’d come to believe it was the best way to be- _you know why_ , I thought, _a museum’s worth of whole galleries of reasons_. The first time we actually did go to bed together I’d told him nervously I wasn’t a virgin, he’d told me that was fine by him, and I certainly shouldn’t worry about that- and I’d nervously wondered did he want me to have more experience with men, did I act like I didn’t have any, was I cold and lifeless, unexciting, too shy and nervous? What if I told him about all the other guys, more friends than boyfriends, I would stop having sex with once we got engaged but some I still talked to (all the one night stands in cars and dorms and private rooms in fancy nightclubs and back rooms of broke-down bars, and in the end they were like Kit because they all saw different sides of me but never really all of me)? Would he still want me if he knew about Ethan, because I worried no one would, or would he think I was a filthy predator; would he still want me if he knew the other things before Ethan I tried forgetting about, the things in long-ago nights? Was he expecting me not to be a virgin- _so he wants to try fucking a junkie slut,_ I thought. With Kit it was safe, perfect, the way it was supposed to be, and that was the problem, because I felt that I didn’t belong there, wherever we were. Sometimes, I felt less like the Unsmiling Tsarevna and more like the false bride from the Goose Girl, the disobedient servant who ended up torturously executed by her own decree for how an imposter should die, or the Crane Wife from the story Hobie had once told me when I was younger, where the husband discovers his wife’s true nature and she must leave forever once he has seen her. There you go, birdlike women who couldn’t tell the truth were everywhere. “You do what you want. If that _is_ what you want.” Slava had raised her eyebrows and I smiled weakly and tried to change the subject.

“And so can you,” she told me, very firm, gesticulating, looking more tired than I’d seen her look all day. “I try and tell you things before. Try and make you remember things you forget. Try and get you to talk about things you don’t want to. Every fucking night some weeks you tried to die. Some of these things you really should think about. If you were happy would you have done all this with me? I think you will never stop harming yourself sometimes. You Americans love to tell women, oh is inevitable you will become your mother, oh ha ha I am forgetful and spend too much money just like my mama, well shit, I spent our youth worrying you would become _my_ mother one day. Drink herself near to death because she hates to be herself and to be alive and then fall out the fucking window and die and not even know it was happening because of being so fucked up she was nearly unconscious. Look at you!” She shook her head. “I find you in hotel in Amsterdam, and you look almost dead.” I was almost incredulous at the last sentence. Out of nowhere I remembered high school, raising my hand to reach a shelf, and my sleeve falling down and exposing my bruised arm and Kotku’s voice lowering in horror _Theodora_ (she used my real, full name, it was serious) _you do not want to get hooked on heroin especially with all the other shit I know you’re on I know you’re in pain I know you’re not happy, but believe me, don’t fucking do it, and tell Slava to stay off it too because she might not listen to me but I know she’ll listen to you_ and I had to tell her about how it was from my dad and I think she believed that, because she said to me _fuck, baby I’m sorry, I know how you feel because you know how my mom and I struggle a lot too and that piece of shit she used to date would get so mad that I wasn’t bringing any money in_ but in a way she predicted the future. I never did tell Slava not to do it. But this, I decided, I would return to later. I tried to suppress the familiar refrain in my mind- _whenever anyone around you says you “have problems” or are “a nice girl but on drugs” what they really mean is that they’re politely saying- all you’re ever going to be is a cheap, unstable junkie who doesn’t belong anywhere and will drive away any every good man and draw in all the bad ones, and die in squalor and filth._ I was starting to be done with listening to those kinds of hauntings. I had present issues to deal with. 

Slava barely paused. “Well you don’t have to do all that, because you’re you. You don’t get to be another person. Neither of us do. You think I never have felt bad either? You think I never have hard things to think about? I want to be happy. I don’t want to be dead. I wish I could say I think you are different now, you want to live now.” By then I was crying, but silently and without effort, like I had ragweed allergies making my eyes water. Sometimes I hated myself for staying silent in all kinds of situations, but this time, I didn’t want to hear Slava stop talking, maybe I wasn’t ready but then I never had been, and I’d already looked in the mirror and seen what I’d needed. “You are too smart to think that even men as good as those will transform you into some other person! If you count on them to do that you will all be fucking miserable. You and sailor boy and Red, all so fucking sad if you spend your life hurting yourself and lying to yourself and wanting to die, not thinking you deserve to feel good or ever live.” I held back more tears, nodding, knowing she was right, knowing Kit and I were never truly happy as engaged people should have been, knowing I could have been Philip’s true friend all this time if I wasn’t the way I was. Or, not that. If I hadn’t thought I wasn’t good enough for someone who was so similar to me, if I hadn’t wanted him to save me from being who I was when ultimately- as I’d realized when I’d seen my mother- being who I was had been the thing that saved me. 

(Philip and Slava had gotten along at the party, but I hadn’t recalled feeling in any way at all jealous or threatened, though I did feel very self-conscious about it. I wished I had gotten to know Philip better, I found myself thinking, until I realized I could of course still do so. I think now he’d wanted that for years but not in the way I felt was necessary. What I’d felt was necessary he’d seen as impossible. Given what we’d shared I realize I was wrong to fear he never cared about me. I think I was afraid of him knowing me, and afraid of letting go of the past. Kit…was another subject, maybe not insurmountable. I was less sure of what would happen, but probably for a while until we figured it out we would both keep it from Mrs. Barbour, trapped in our state of children lying to adults; but now supposedly for their sake rather than ours. I used to think Kit’s coolness around me meant that he was trying to show me he could take care of me, or that he just effortlessly was the strong man to my unstable woman- sometimes I worried that he thought I was too unstable to speak about the deaths of his father and brother- that he would be a protector. The way I observed how he casually and firmly told a Vanity Fair reporter he recognized when we were at some gala because he knew I’d happily do a lot of things but I didn’t like being interviewed because it reminded me of being famous at thirteen for the worst reason, “thank you for coming, but my fiancée and I are in the middle of discussing something with another publication, we’ll get back to you,” and we weren’t and we never did; when he told me he thought I was “doing better” instead of attacking and insulting me at every turn about the drugs or trying to force me to go to some ward like anyone else would have done, even when I got really fucked up; the way he’d looked at me directly and evenly when before I realized it didn’t matter much I’d argued with him because I’d seen him walking through the streets with Em, who had always hated me and looked at me like I was nothing but she still ended up on my bridesmaid list because I didn't have friends, I’d said that I always knew he wouldn’t want to marry me and he must think the same as everyone else, that I’m nothing but a crazy low-class gold-digging junkie bitch, I knew I was a philanthropic cause and not an actual family member- as Todd had so tellingly implied when he said I’d inspired him to work with “disadvantaged” children, whatever the fuck that meant, the easy housemaid he fucked before he found a real wife, but he said, so firmly, affronted and frustrated but not provoked into rage, _of course I don’t think that, you don’t have to be so vindictive, you really can’t let your insecurities get the best of you the way you do, it’s like you’re afraid of people knowing you with how cold and closed off you get – but we all have known you for years, Theodora_ ; the way he never cried in front of me even when I woke up jumping from the bed and I knew I’d been talking in my sleep clear enough for him to hear about how I wished it had been me, and I know he must have been thinking about his own family. But maybe he was trying to keep a protective guard over himself too. Not let it all control him. He never acted like my father acted towards my mother; my father was never as understanding of my mother as Kit was of me on our worst days. Neither my mother or I got the men I believed we deserved, and I thought, marriage made no sense.)

Slava noticed I was still crying. “Come here,” she told me, nodding, “ah, I know, I know.” So we just lay down on the bed together for a while, like old times, even though I didn’t want old times and part of me felt I should get away from her at least physically even though I didn’t really want to, and I was mostly sober enough that I know I’d remember it the next day, and this time I knew I couldn’t try to die anymore even though I had a feeling sometimes I might miss wanting to. Our relative silence was interrupted by the news. “Antwerp, not Netherlands, and I still have to hear it, I hate the fucking Dutch language,” she said about the TV which was still on, “but you are right, the Dutch make nice paintings.” I laughed weakly, wiping my face with the bathrobe sleeve.

“I’m not doing it,” I told her. “I mean I’m going back. I just can’t do the marriage. I think it’s bad for both of us and I’m going to tell him that’s what I think, before it’s too late and we’ve been married for five years and hate each other and his mother is still too depressed to go outside and we haven’t done shit for anyone.” I didn’t want to hate Kit. We were more similar than I might have ever thought had we never gotten engaged. We were both pretending to be happy with one another for our mothers’ sake. On good days, we convinced ourselves that was happiness. It would have ended. And I really didn’t understand why I was so convinced my mother would have wanted me to make myself suffer for it all- she wouldn’t have liked it so much either. As much as I cared about the Barbours and knew that they did care about me, I think part of me thought that the other people in their world, they didn’t understand who I was, who my mother and I were. And I was still her daughter. I took a deep breath. This was going to look very bad when I returned. I’d handle it. I’d been surrounded by whispers and rumors and lies for years. More honesty and openness would lessen the burdens for all of us. I sighed and remembered my mother in the mirror and understood, again, she wouldn’t have wanted me to live a lie. And I still don’t think Mrs. Barbour would have wanted that for me and certainly not for her own child, nor, I think, would she have benefited from it, even though when I returned it had taken her a while to get used to it, but she’d really been expecting it since I took off. “I need a life of my own.”

Out of nowhere, though she appeared half asleep, Slava took my face in one hand, something like happiness in her face. I wondered if she’d kiss me. “I used to think you were just like the painting. Chained to the wall like the bird. For years I thought about that.” I didn’t know what to say to that, but I don’t know if she expected me to say anything. “Maybe it is good that not everything stays the same.” I always thought I was like Fabritius’ goldfinch, too- small and weak and hidden, surviving pointlessly and with nothing to show for my life and nothing to justify myself, stolen and silent and imprisoned. If that was me, I’d thought, Slava was Tchaikovsky’s black swan- the dread sorcerer’s shadowy daughter whose inheritance was to deceive. Bird girls steeped and trapped in lies. That was then. We’d been given circumstances, but for better or worse- even though I’d always worried it was for the worse- we couldn’t stay who we were as children forever. It just wasn’t possible. It was out of our control, even if other things didn’t have to be.

“I’m not sure if anything stays the same,” I said.

We were quiet for a while. Slava fell asleep soon enough, the sort of drifting sleep that you wake up from within ten or fifteen minutes. I vaguely remembered being fifteen and waking up in the living room, disoriented and blacked out, the late morning sun burning my eyes as Slava rested entangled with me on the couch, and Xandra lowered her _Cosmopolitan_ and looked us down- “finally awake! Only eleven o’clock!” Xandra had said, amused. “Well, I guess you’re only young once, I’ll keep this whole party a secret between us girls.” That was probably because we didn’t completely destroy a whole room that time and thus weren’t awakened by “what the hell, you girls, just because I don’t tell you what you can and can’t do doesn’t mean you can be this irresponsible and at this age! And your father just leaves me to deal with all this…”

She looked so guileless in sleep, and embraced me so gently, even though even though there were times these days, probably for years, her face had a quality portraits of Catherine de Medici did- a weathered, imperious ruthlessness that was rendered even more noticeable by the almost unfazed nature of her expression, and I wondered, what parts of herself she had not shown me, what had she seen, even if she’d told me, or all but said. And as I was lying down I thought of Philip, all those years ago, lying in bed, and I thought, if I’m not dead yet, I’ll figure this all out somehow, everyone else back home is probably still trying to figure out what I’d done and what had just happened. Out of nowhere, I remembered how Kit had told me that as a child he’d thought Andy and I would be married, and we couldn’t laugh at it even though it was such an absurd memory and less uncomfortable than remembering how people thought I was Tom’s girlfriend, even though I sometimes worried people thought I saw Kit as some kind of replacement for Andy, or that he was marrying me only because he didn’t know how to grieve for his brother. Kit had said, calm as if nothing had happened to Andy, “you were such a good friend to my brother, he would have had such a lonely childhood without you,” and I couldn’t say, but he did even when I was there. Maybe if Andy was alive I’d never had tried to go through with this in the first place. I feel like he would have told me, at least his kid self that I knew would have said, in that kind of superior way he used to have like when he raised his hand knowing he was the only one in the room who had the answer, “I know the two of you can’t really think this is a good idea.” So much of my life, aside from the parts made entirely of lies, has been abysses of “what if, what if”. I should probably, I thought, get around to fixing that, too.

I tried to rest, if not sleep.

_

Kit had told me that he thought I was doing a lot better. But what I didn’t say in return was that you can’t track progress incompletely and that was what he was doing even if he didn’t realize it and maybe at times I was doing that with myself as well. The person I had been would forever be a part of who I was. I think this part of me might have come out had I never lost my mother, had we never been in the wrong place at the wrong time, had I never taken the painting. Everything went wrong from there but I think being that way was how I was made sometimes.

I speak for myself, but to paint the full picture, the image includes Slava as well. This is about myself during my time in Vegas and after, but I was like her and she was like me, and maybe we are still that similar, despite how we’ve changed over the years from the people we were. It didn’t matter what we did, but what people thought we might have done, would do, definitely had done, and sometimes, enough times, they were right. Statistics waiting to happen, statistics that had long ago passed us by like the age of old Route 66. Ultimately, they always decided where we were going, they were very confident their guess was better than ours. They thought we were fun, but the party always ended. We didn’t take care of ourselves, sure, but we did all we could to take care of each other, which might not have been much given what we were like but it kept us alive. I think this is why Kotku was both exasperated by us and endeared to us, because she saw herself in us, and she saw we weren’t fighting so wholeheartedly for our own lives in the way she had when she waged a war against what must have felt like the whole world for her own survival. I had ignored what Kotku once said, I thought my life _was_ like that Janis Joplin song, I thought I was free because I lived like I had nothing left to lose even though that was because I didn’t want to be alive.

And so I lied in those years, and I wasn’t healthy or good to myself, or even free really, but I was the closest I had, even up until recently, ever been in my life to being honest, in that plastic-and-neon world of pools with unnaturally colored water and carnivalesque resorts and distorted and deleted memory, this place that I’d thought was so false and so wrongly new, I felt I was who I was, a sort of state of being in my element even though it felt so bad. The loss, the attack, it made me who I was but I think I was always on the road to being who I am anyway, and I couldn’t, didn’t, refused to know until I saw my mother in the mirror and saw her merciful forgiveness. And so I will always look back on those years with love even if it coincides with hatred and regret and anger, and I will always see it when I look over my shoulder because I was never expected to leave even though I wanted to so badly, and it will never be my home and never really was and sometimes I lie in bed thinking _was I really that young_ but I think that city was the place that led me to starting to be who I am now, just as much as the painting was the thing that made me who I am and the attack was the event that made me who I am, the city takes this slot because it told me who I really am, which is why I resent it, which is why I tried to bury it as if nothing happened when I went back to New York, which is why I don’t like it, which is why part of me will always miss it even though I know the past cannot be returned to once it’s gone. The past isn’t always reconciled with, either, and for me, for years, it wasn’t.

I didn’t blame him, but Kit couldn’t help me. He didn’t know that part of me was used to thinking that I could never be completely honest with anyone, or else they would see me as forever unfixable, just bad. He couldn’t teach me honesty, if he had no idea what that would mean for me. Marrying him wasn’t good for either of us. It wouldn’t do anything for Andy, no matter how much the two of them seemed so similar sometimes. It probably wouldn’t have made my mother happy, given how neither of us really fit together. And I was not his mother’s salvation that would somehow happen through saving me. But it was never going to happen and I was going to have to save myself. And I had spent these years too afraid to let Philip know who I really was, maybe less because he would hate to know the real me and more because I hated the idea that he’d know the real me. I thought he’d saved my life and I think part of me thought I had to again be saved from being the person I was. The path had stretched out behind me, but I hadn’t gone too far forward. And I did not have to stay where I was.

_

I decided it was time I got out of bed. 

I gently picked up Slava’s arm, thankfully her good arm, that rested on my ribcage so she wouldn’t wake up, and saw she looked in adulthood so similar to how she did as a kid- long-limbed and slight, passed out with her shoes on, her body splayed out on the bed and her gaunt faced framed by long black hair, looking like Jozef Simmler’s _Death of Barbara Radziwill_ or maybe more like an Edward Gorey sketch: “B is for Bohuslava, of booze, bullets, and blow”. And, I supposed, heroin now too. But that was me, as well, even if I’d rationalized to myself otherwise. I wasn’t going to guilt myself over it. But I wasn’t going to lie to myself about it either. I didn’t have to do either of those things.

The men who were friends with Hobie, they were always nice to me; I didn’t care that they were mostly gay, in fact most of the men from my mother’s work had been gay so it was kind of like being similar to her especially because we were both now in unexpected fields of art. I certainly didn’t mind that Hobie was gay even though I didn’t really realize he was when I was younger, but when I was maybe sixteen and very sick I told him as he gave me medicine and put his steady, dark hand on my forehead, that just because I never talked about it, didn’t mean I was against him or anything and I hoped he knew that, because in that moment I was sure he thought the worst but he looked surprised and told me of course he never thought that. Sometimes I felt like his friends were my friends more than anyone in my New York school that had accepted me like a king choosing the prettiest court lady for his mistress because I was the Museum Attack girl (well, most of them except for Mr. Abernathy who was standoffish and weird, and initially called me “the child Hobie took in,” although once when I was seventeen and home alone while Hobie was at a doctor’s appointment, Mr. Abernathy, who seemed to have had a few glasses of wine, saw me reading a huge art book by myself and smoking out the window, and he said for a minute I reminded him of “an old friend from school, no parents, she had to make her own way in the world but she _did_ ” and I thought, _what the fuck_ , but maybe this was like when I heard people swear in Russian and started remembering, and he told me to tell Hobie he came by, that he had good news to share). I was thinking about them because one of them once saw my small pupils and told me with a hand on my shoulder and I looked down as he said understandingly, _you know if you tell him he’ll help you, but you have to think you deserve to get off of it_. I told him, trying not to cry, that I had just come back from the eye doctor where they’d given me drops. He clearly didn’t believe me, but didn’t say anything else.

I thought of all this and tried to imagine what was in her mind, and I wondered if this had been similar to what she’d been thinking about me every time she’d dragged me back to life only to have to do it all over again the next day. She was smiling faintly in her sleep but I could see a scar on her temple that wasn’t there when we were kids, and what I thought was a cigarette burn on her collarbone, and her skin was rough, and the circles under her eyes were worse than ever, and somehow I suspected there was a bigger story behind her teeth being fixed. I’d thought indignantly in these past weeks she had been operating under some true hypocrisy to come to me with concerns about my life when I knew part of her was like some macabre Death and the Maiden painting and couldn’t see her life without being spun around in the embracing arms of all the insanity we’d gotten into as kids plus the addition of whatever had been added since then, even if she’d rationalized it as doing it for fun (or work) and not a death wish, and maybe my reasonings were different, but I realized I could recognize that because I wasn’t so different. I remembered Kotku telling us during a quiet moment, her jeans covered in her gel pen doodles and her Claire’s necklace of dangling stars gleaming against her black tank top like gold leaf star adornments Diego Quispe Tito painted on a saint’s robe, as we all sat in the hallway during a free period passing around a Red Bull and trying to figure out what time to go to the movies that night to see _Sin City_ , but then we got more serious, - “Listen, I know you take good care of each other, never stop doing that. But you have to learn how to take care of yourselves too. I’m graduating this year.” I think she was preemptively telling us goodbye, and I didn’t want to think about it because I didn’t know how to react or the right thing to say, and I knew she’d make it out there and I knew she had to leave it all behind. “I didn’t have a lot of choices. Make sure you know what to do with the ones you get.”

“We were party girls,” Slava had laughed fondly to Philip, “and now we are together celebrating again,” like we had been the Homecoming dance planning committee with confetti and streamers and speakers playing the latest Destiny’s Child hit in the school gym; and sure, we’d had normal fun times like other kids, we’d selected the most expensive clothes in the mall to try on for kicks, we’d selected the most explicit hit songs to request to the DJ at the school dances, we’d watched SOS Iceberg a ton of times, we’d stayed up all night and talked about all the things we wanted to do Later, in the Future, but that wasn’t most of it. I wanted to say, and if Philip wasn’t there maybe I would have said, remember how every day we were smoking and popping pills and taking E and breathing in liquor and then we jumped into the deep end of the pool and dragged each other underneath the water or ran off-road into the sands and somehow didn’t drown or need our stomachs pumped or get lost out in the desert? Remember the time you didn’t know how dangerous hitchhiking is and you tried to get us a ride with some guys by a van parked near us who were checking us out and yelling “hey little girls,” both of whom had at least twenty years on us, until I forced your arm down and grabbed you and ran back into the Wal-Mart and dragged us to hide in the bathroom before they could come closer or figure out where we went and I started yelling at you that it wasn’t like taking a cab or riding around with some boy from school who wanted to blast his new Eminem CD and smoke a joint and fool around and hadn’t you ever paid attention to the news here, didn’t you hear that news story from last week, and to never ever fucking do that ever even if we have to walk in a hailstorm, and you said, I never have problem hitching rides before, I never would let them hurt my little Princess you know that, I thought we can always just run away like we do at the mall if they get too crazy? (“Sometimes”, she’d said on another occasion, “for the past few years since I am not a child anymore, they act strange to me. I run sometimes if I can. I learn from people who are not so good, kind of like Kotku did. You know what I mean?” I didn’t want to know. But I think I understood.) 

Her life was danger, like it was all she knew, and sometimes, it hadn’t always been a choice. I lied like exhaling and took pills like inhaling- her breaths were intoxicated too. I wanted to die and she wanted to enjoy her life a lot of the time, but also a lot of the time I think she wanted to escape her life. She saw the world’s problems and wouldn’t let them get her down, and I loved that about her and sometimes wished I could have that quality. But, despite my own issues, I knew she wasn’t without hers. Maybe she worried she would be like her mother too, the way I worried about being my father, and had her own versions of “I’m not that bad, not now, not yet,” as long as she wasn’t on her deathbed and didn’t want to be, then no problem. I don’t think she ever got to understand the concept that she had the capacity to get better, as if it wasn’t even worth considering as a fantastical possibility, I realized even though I’d always plainly known it. It was something I probably could have talked with her about a long time ago, the fact that she’d on some level ingrained the idea that not only would she never get better but that this dangerous state was completely natural for her, this state that people seemed to assume would kill her young if she was lucky, and not kill anyone else if others were lucky. But I don’t know if either of us had the experience or mindset to really get into it at fourteen or fifteen, and now….Well, I told myself, if she’s listened to me before she’ll do it again, if she wants me to talk about things I’m not sure I’m ready to, then I’ll do the same for her and I don’t think she won’t accept hearing it. She said she didn’t see why she should stop- but up until even days before then, I would have said the same. Maybe it was a bit too idealistic, but hadn’t she wanted me to realize doing all I knew how to do was no way to live? I had to at least try even if I thought it didn’t work. If I didn’t try, what did that mean?

I sat up in the bed, walked to the long mirror, and put on my mother’s earrings I’d left there. I’d been planning on wearing them to the wedding and had put them on for the party, but I felt like a thief for wearing them, like a falsified image; my wearing them seemed worse than my father and Xandra taking them. The engagement ring was nearby- I felt I owed Kit the honesty of taking it off not just because I’d left but because of what I’d left him for and what I’d been doing. I looked at myself. I might have looked rough, but I looked at myself clearly, and recognized myself as I was, and I was beginning to understand I had to see that as a start. I remembered the two girls who’d spent a holiday weekend in a deteriorating highway motel and neither of them had known how to be alive but neither of them really knew it. And now we were halfway across the world in a flat in a cold wintry city rather than a dirty room in the desert, still fucked up and still alive. So, technically, we still at least had a chance. If I really wanted to make my mother happy, I decided, without joy, I’d live like I had a chance.

Slava rolled over. “Hey, Princess, I hope you did not let me sleep for too long,” she said and she propped herself up on one arm to see the local news report about what seemed to be a girl surviving being stabbed in the leg at her college dorm and she said, “you remind me earlier, we really were crazy kids, so lucky that nothing that bad ever happened to us.” 

Yeah, no shit Slava, I thought, and I raised my voice. ”What the fuck, something _that bad_ just happened, do you want to tear your artery open? Be careful of your arm! You could have died if it wasn’t for me, and the thing I did, _we_ did-”

She gestured with her hand, a sort of deescalating movement, and shifted to a more upward position. “All right, all right Princess, don’t worry, just keep it down. The neighbors are still at it and they are real freaks always doing it loud, even in middle of the night, and if we catch their attention for all I know they will ask us to join in,” she said, clearly unamused with them.

“Why the fuck do you have to act like this,” I said, exasperated, and I put my hand to my forehead because my migraine was still going on.

“You look like her,” she told me after looking at me for a second.

“What?” I asked without thinking right as she said it even if it was obvious what she meant.

“I searched your mother on the internet once. Found some old news stories, like _People_ , talked a little about her life, even fashion photography website with one page dedicated to her ads, some very nice pictures of her out there. I think, you have much in common, in a lot of ways.” I swallowed very hard, realizing I’d never been able to search for my mother in the news; I’d never liked to think about the fact that our names had been mentioned quite a lot over the years, that I’d had hundreds of reporters after me who’d wanted to interview me for posterity. Recently some kind of Chronicle-style local news show had telephoned me asking to speak with me by name “for a feature” and I froze and could feel a panic attack coming on until the guy on the line said something about a segment on Native American entrepreneurs in New York – how did the television people find me? Were the papers I was mentioned in, talking about my mother and her family?- and despite being shaken I was ultimately relieved, but still hung up the phone. “Theodora Decker, did you say? I don’t know who she is, you must have the wrong number,” I’d lied.

“Sorry. I just don’t know what to say.” I gave a shuddering breath. My mother had once told me I was gentle, and later I thought she meant shy or insecure, like so many other people said about me even sometimes in Vegas; more recently I’d begun to think I wasn’t gentle at all, and certainly insecure but less _shy_ and more _reserved_ or _withdrawn_. Whatever I was, I was starting to think, maybe she wouldn’t be as angry with me as I feared. And maybe I didn’t have to be so afraid of who I was. 

Slava nodded. “Yah. Well I just want you to know. I know you don’t like yourself so much, you tell me you think your mother wouldn’t love you now which obviously is not true. You didn’t want to live. A lot of reasons why that is wrong, and of course you are your own individual, but I have to tell you, how are you going to hate yourself when you are like her so much, without even trying.” Maybe another time with more pills and liquor in me, or if I was still a teenager, I would have yelled “well you didn’t fucking know her”, or “fine but she didn’t have any of the fucked up things wrong with me that I do,” but I didn’t.

I took a deep breath and thought of the mirror again, in Amsterdam. “I’ve been thinking about that lately very in depth, actually,” I said and we were quiet for a while.

She looked at me, her eyes very soft, in the way no one who didn’t know her well would ever imagine to be capable of appearing. Were people really as scared of her now as she claimed? I recalled things I’d imagined over the years I’d say if I could see her again, but that had been before I knew that I was going to, and I didn’t say any of them.

“I always thought to myself everyone was wrong about you,” I blurted out instead (at least back then I was sure they were all wrong, later I just wanted them to be wrong) because I had to say something, and I knew this was a much bigger conversation than something that could be confined to a little while in this room, this would be ongoing and maybe over years if I was going to talk to her about it, but I had to. “Listen, I know you don’t want to hurt yourself, I’ve been so happy to see you. I know you didn’t care what people thought but I did. And I- and you were just a kid too. I realize that now. I don’t know if either of us knew how young we were,” and she was saying she never cared what people thought of her now or back then, especially because back then didn’t she have me, and she’d been fine and people began to respect her, and she was having a great time, and I knew she kept telling herself that because comparatively, she had been, and I was saying, “but I do, Slava, you _know_ I cared so much about you, it wasn’t fucking right for you. And this isn’t all right now, either.” I think I meant, everything I did and didn’t know about, after I had left. I still didn’t know what became of her father or even if she knew. “And yeah, fine, you’re right,” I was trying not to cry again, “I did want to die. I’m trying to get better now, at least I’m going to try, fine. I wish you hadn’t had to do what you had to do for me but I also wish I didn’t have the feeling I’ll have to do the same things for you one day and I wish you worried for yourself half as much as you did for me…I don’t want us to be as bad as when we were kids forever but right now it really looks like we are,” I was back down on the bed again, my head in my hands. I thought of what she’d said -stay away from the ones you love too much, those are the ones who will kill you. What did she mean by saying it to me? Why did she believe that? Which one of us was she trying to tell it to? 

After a long quiet moment: “Then, to say that, I think you are getting better,” she told me, and I didn’t say “thank you” or “and what the fuck would you know about getting better” or “what if I want to but I don’t think I deserve to get better, what then”. “I know,” she went on, “I know. Yes I know we were fucked up kids, well, what the fuck were we going to do about that then. And I know we are fucked up now, believe me, Princess.” Another quiet moment. “Hey.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “If you want to be so healthy then come walk with me out in the air. Physical therapy like they say. Better than lying down and crying and sleeping. We did not come all the way here so I can lock you inside. No way to feel better. Come on.” So I tried to stop crying so people wouldn’t stare at me and think all kinds of things, but it took me a while and I wiped my face halfheartedly and she went over my skin again with a towel and I didn’t bother to move or tell her to go away, while she said “shh shh, you’re safe, is all right,” and I put on my coat and made Slava button hers that she’d been wearing already like a bathrobe (“Stop your worrying, you are like anxious housewife”) and we went out.

We were quiet walking through the snow-covered city for a while; surrounded by couples and families and individuals, going in and out of shops, driving cars, laughing and talking, walking dogs, the setting around us decorated for the holiday, as if everyone was happy if only for these few weeks. Slava had been ranting about the tax fraud scandals involving the Antwerp city government officials, then abruptly began insisting to me that this wasn’t nearly as cold as Yakutsk, where she was firm she would take me one day.

“Why do you always need to have a good time?” I asked her, laughing rather miserably, which wasn’t quite what I meant to say, it hadn’t come out right, but I think she got what I meant, she’d been quiet for a long time, and I knew she was thinking about what I told her. She might have thought she was as good as indestructible as a kid and maybe still did in a way, at least until she’d been shot. I think she wanted to see herself that way because living that dangerously was in her mind the only other option other than to go back to her childhood and accept the possibility she would be hurt by others and not be able to do anything about it, but it wasn’t as if she could have been oblivious to the fact that everyone acted like she was born ruined beyond repair- maybe in part because she knew I felt that I was.

Slava nodded a little as we stepped forward, stretching out her arm. “I know I don’t go about it in a nice way always, believe me Princess, I know, and I had good times but also had really fucking bad times in the years after you left. Money problems, many other problems. And I know back then you must worry, felt like I forgot you. But I mean to say, you are always worried you are like your father, you are losing connection with your mother. Me- either direction, mother or father, is bad. Now I am not angry with my mother, and my father, I have let go of that long ago. But to be like either of them, I have known since I was very young, means - I can harm myself only or myself and others, and either way, mother or father, I hate life every step I take. I don’t want to be _daughter_ , just me.”

I understood what she was saying, even though a part of me whispered, well, she worried you’d be like her mother, and now that you killed a man right before trying to kill yourself you can be just as fucked up as _both_ her parents, even though she said so proudly I was an example of how a woman shoots to protect who and what she loves, even though she keeps telling you: _you did not even mean to kill him and perhaps you should have meant to- I will not go into detail for your sake_. I didn’t expect her to go on.

“Last year, I was with nice boy Mikhail for little while, crazy summer we had, party every day, but I had things to do and he went back to Kazan, did not want to live on my money forever and I respect that, self reliant. It would not have worked out. He did not learn much of me. He would not have liked what he saw.” She, shrugged, looked directly at me and stopped walking, as if attempting to convey I would understand what secrets she held. I supposed that wasn’t so wrong. She resumed walking and speaking. “Very unusual to have a man treat me as real _girlfriend_. You know more about that than I do, really. I told you, they never stay. Maybe I never let them. I always wanted to know what it was like, really that was why I got with him. They are so often afraid of me, that or, you know how it is, never like me for long.” I didn’t know how to respond. I’m not afraid of you, I thought; I wish I had told you in the mornings I remembered the nights before. “But that was more recent and I am reliant on myself. What happened in my life in times before, all these years, I will tell you all about some day soon, whole story, but you will not like some of it.” She paused for a long while as we walked through the cool night air. I could see both our breath, like smoke. “One day, a long while ago. Last days in Vegas. I am taking a real hard beating, worse than ever, and I am trying to fight back just as hard, but cannot do so much with just my hands, you know? He thinks I steal drugs from him for myself. I did not, not that day at least. He does not believe that. Who would believe a thief does not steal?” She smiled ruefully and I swallowed hard. “He leaves me on the floor, covering head with my arms, kicked in stomach so hard I throw up like when I am twelve and my father is back drinking again. He gets bored, goes to drink in bed. When I can get up I get to cabinet and find hammer under sink. And I go to him, sit down in chair near bed, and say very serious, reason why I use false identification and names, is because I kill a man. I beat him to death with thing just like this. I do gesture with it to show what I mean. I say I never want to do it again.” For a moment I thought she sounded the way she did when she told me about how she’d stolen the painting- like she would cry. “He is so drunk, his body is weak. So it does not come to more attacking. And even without that, it would not. He believes me. I am convincing.” She sounded almost serene next: “That was the day I told myself I would live differently. I said to myself I want to make my life good for me.”

Hobie confided in me he always remembers hearing Philip, much younger, practice Chopin’s “Marche Funebre,” every time he hears the song, and in that moment, I thought about the first time I heard about the pipe wrench, one of the men her father killed.

She sighed, nodded her head like an admission. “For a while I am fine with getting harmed just so I could say it did not really count, I wasn’t getting hurt, because I act in return, or because I could take it. Realized otherwise and that shit is all over for a long time. I am grown now. I try and spend my time better. I never really want to hurt anyone. You have to believe that. I tell you when you shot Martin, I never killed any people, but if I have to defend myself I will. Sometimes in the past I think I didn’t care about what happened to me so long as I knew I could defend myself. The world has all these problems, I accept that and try to get through anyway even though I know I add problems to it too, who does not. I go places, sometimes I go back but they go on without me, and that is life, I just go around the world, I do not have to belong forever to appreciate somewhere.” And she said, so peacefully, “I just try to enjoy myself even when it’s not nice things. You can be like your mother and also your own person. I am not like you. I cannot do that. I have nobody good to be like.”

I was reminded of, years ago, Slava telling me about how one time her father beat her until she was bleeding, and when he became sober again, he’d cried at her feet, telling her he didn’t realize it was her, he didn’t even know what he’d thought, and did he ever tell her that she looks just like her mother, _exactly_ like her- (Slava always denied this to me and said her father’s memory was broken, “I do not fault him but it is”) - even though he had no choice but to raise her to be like him if she had to come around the world with him, if he didn’t try she would end up like him anyway or end up dead, so he had to at least try and give her a chance of surviving, and there was no choice about it and she wouldn’t want to be a regular girl anyway, and she looks exactly like her sometimes, and _my Bohuslava, I am sorry but you must understand, we let her die_.

“Yeah,” I said, my throat tight, taking a deep breath, glad I was too tired to cry because I did not want to go through the whole routine right then where I cried and she spent our time and energy comforting me, glad I was too tired to even interrupt with _oh dear God, Slava_ , because I guess she was right, I had to hear it, which meant she had to say it. “I think I know what you mean.” We walked on and some laughing American tourists took cell phone pictures – what ever happened to regular cameras? - of an old building.

“Glad to have gotten you out of Amsterdam. To think the unprofessional people hardly even let me in when I came to that hotel after I keep saying I am your friend. And being in that hotel all day and night- very unhealthy.” Yes, I thought, you can say that again. “Remember when we kept our money in our shoes at shit motel that holiday because when we went to walk Popchyk we knew it would be so easy for anyone to pick lock and steal from us?” she said, after a moment.

“I got blisters from the paper rubbing against my feet,” I winced, remembering how I’d bathed my feet in cold water in the motel bathtub because it hurt so much. We were probably the only girls our age who didn’t carry handbags, let alone wallets. I never remembered to use mine- or maybe, since my mother gave it to me, it felt wrong to carry around while I was getting up to trouble- and Slava didn’t have one. “We were fucking crazy,” I said, laughing, a thought that had gone through my head about a thousand times that day, even though keeping our money safe in our shoes was probably one of the most sensible things we’d done.

“Yah,” she agreed, “but, as you say, we were kids. You going to be mad at us forever for that? Being kids is something we will never do again.”

I shook my head no. “I know that’s the past now,” I told her, “we’re never going to go there again. We have tomorrow to worry about.” I wanted to tell her, I wanted to remember all the hours of the day from now on. I wouldn’t always enjoy it, but it was necessary. I guess I’d talk about that with her later. Not that she didn’t know or didn’t know I understood, but that I wanted her to hear me say that I knew, and I wanted to say it. I felt like, in a strange way, since we’d reunited, I was beginning to be at peace with some of the past, even the parts I didn’t remember. Maybe it was the same for her.

“Would you ever go to Bohuslav?” I asked her. Her father was born in Siberia and from Novoagansk, but he’d spend most of his youth in Bohuslav, it wasn’t his hometown really but essentially also was, and I didn’t think she’d ever been. I think this was my way of asking what had happened to him, if she knew. We were learning to be more direct with each other, but it was still an ongoing process.

She shrugged. “I will not say I will never go.” She looked at me, stopping for a moment, continuing to walk on. “My father never made it back. Not even for burial. I will tell you about it all later. Not now.” She sounded almost matter-of-fact about it, like talking about a subject she’d researched.

“I’m sorry,” I said, almost inaudibly. I wasn’t sure what exactly I was trying to convey I was sorry for- maybe it was a lot of things.

“Don’t ever apologize for the past, Princess. That is for me to do,” she said somberly and was strangely quiet for a moment, but only a moment. “Would you ever go back to Las Vegas?” she asked, like it had only occurred to her now it would be technically possible for either or both of us to return.

“I honestly don’t know,” I said, not even sure what I thought about the question in the first place. “Not right now. I’d need a good reason to be there.” She nodded, said something about old ghosts, leaving under bad circumstances. I thought, with my luck, once I got started, of my buyers I’d have to go to would probably be in Vegas.

“Well,” she shrugged, “whole rest of our lives to decide to or not.” I wasn’t sure or not if she was making a joke.

“You’ve chosen an interesting city to stay,” I said after a moment even though I wasn’t so enthused with Antwerp, and not using the word ‘live’ with its implication of permanence, and she raised her eyebrows as if she sensed judgment, “but we shouldn’t be out for too long in case we get lost or get a cold, you know…” Not only did I want to not be outside too long, I didn’t want to be away in Europe for too long either. This whole ordeal of the night had only reaffirmed that I needed to go back, and preferably start by talking with Hobie as soon as possible. I wished I hadn’t lied to him so much, and that I hadn’t thought I needed to.

“I get shot in my arm and you worry I may need to use tissues in winter,” Slava responded, “Americans are funniest people in the world. And, lost? I am the one familiar with this city. If you are so concerned and don’t believe me then use the phone for directions. I keep forgetting about the phone. Much more advanced than what we used to have. Maybe too advanced. Not good for wits to be able to search everything and find it so instantly without any thinking. Now come. That is very beautiful bridge. Nice view over water.”

“Fine,” I said, following her as she dragged me gently with her good arm, not really complaining, at least she wasn’t making me go to some nightclub. That would probably come soon enough, whenever we saw each other next, though. But I was realizing I wouldn’t really mind going. I wanted her to show me. I wanted to know what her life was, see it and be in it, even if it would never entirely overlap, one hundred percent, with mine. I did not push her away. I thought I was tired of doing that. “Just a little while more.”

“I know, Princess,” she said, “we are tired sick old hags who need real rest instead of smoke in front of TV, and there is a lot to do, with all of this, you know,” and I told her to keep it down even though none of the tourists or locals heard us or even cared or would have known what she meant. And there was so much I had to do and so much I wanted to take care of and so much that should have been said, but in the moment, we just walked down the historic roads aimlessly, like we did years ago in another newer city, but it was different this time, it would all be different now, and it had to be, and it couldn’t not be. I knew where I was going, even though I wasn’t sure what would happen. I had no idea where Slava was going or what would happen next with her. But I wasn’t so sure if she did either- we lived differently. But as of that day, we were both living on our own terms, the way we’d once vowed as children, and I was beginning to understand no matter what our differences were, in our selves or lives we weren’t going to lose one another- both because of and in spite of our similarities. There were so many things, I thought, I could now understand better, now that I was willing to allow myself to do it.

“You know,” she said, stopping, “airports will all be very crowded for holidays. Bad days for travel. You do not need to go now.” No, I thought, I didn’t, and I didn’t want to run from her again when I didn’t have to. 

“I know,” I said quietly. Maybe tomorrow night. “I can wait before I go back.” I thought that I didn’t really like myself and I didn’t think was a good person but I wanted to try to forgive myself sometime after I started to do better and fix things. I said unprompted, “thank you,” kind of stiff, moving away from her a little, because I didn’t know how to articulate that I think there is a possibility neither of us would have lived to that moment, maybe not even to age seventeen, without the other, so of course I had to forgive both of us. As I moved away, she turned to look at me, and reached out her cold, ungloved hand towards mine. I did not move away again. I supposed there was no point in that kind of dishonesty.

I was going to tell her about what I’d tried to do in the hotel when we got back, I realized. She had to know. And I had to say it. Not out here. But it was time. There were a lot of things that it was time for.

Slava said, looking at me, “I am the one who should be the one thanking you,” and I supposed it evened out in the end and we’d really helped each other despite everything else we’d done, and I swore to myself in a few minutes we’d have to get moving, and we’d turn back and take a long time to get back because I felt lost even though Slava was saying she obviously knew where we were, but we’d get there, I’d tell her I was making her turn around with me and go back to her place, seriously, because even if she didn’t mind her immune system being out in the snow long enough to risk a cold days before I knew I had to go back to New York and go through an airport during the holiday season first, I sure fucking did and we had a lot to do tomorrow and she’d say, all right Princess, I know.

**Author's Note:**

> this was written last summer/fall but never posted until now.


End file.
